She and Archibald rode often to the Shaker village where Eldress Martha was in her element with work and responsibility, pouring upon her torrent-wise. Even on her busiest days she had time for Archibald. The friendship between the two, whose lives had run in grooves so different, was a real thing and the man went away from his hours with the tender-hearted, steel-willed old woman with an uplift of spirit. After all the needs of brave souls were much the same. Whether it was Eldress Martha with her religious faith and her life of the spirit or Dr. Fullerton with his agnosticism and bluff materialism, the test of the soul was its sincerity and courage. The doctor had put it in a nutshell, the night he had fought for Ezra Watt’s life and won. Playing the game was the thing. To choose a game in which one believes there was good and to play it for all there was in it—that was the life worth living. If love and laughter walked with the player, so much the better. If not,—still there was the game.
And the more Archibald went the Valley ways, the more he realized that, in one form or another, neighboring was the great game.—There in the valley—out beyond—wherever men and women worked and hoped and loved and suffered, there was call for players stout of heart, strong of will, great of soul, wise of brain. Once when a baby’s hand had curled round his finger, he had said to himself that neighboring was not the last word, that a man’s own meant more; but, during those Summer days when Pegeen and he went up and down the Valley, knocking at the doors of hearts and lives, he came to realize dimly that a man’s own reaches out beyond the doors of his home and that if he follows it to the soul heights and the love limits, he will find himself, walking there with the brotherhood of Man.
Ginsy Shalloway, who, by virtue of “sewing around,” had gained a shrewd knowledge of human nature and was prone to sharp criticism, voiced the general verdict when she admitted that “the artist man’s friendliness rang true.
“Seems as if he honestly liked folks and was real set on their liking him,” she said, when the matter came up for discussion at the ladies’ aid society. “I don’t know as I ever saw a city fellow with as few trimmings. He’s pleased as can be when he gets an invite to dinner and he eats so hearty, you’d think he didn’t get the right kind of victuals at home, if you didn’t know Peg. He was eating dinner up at Nelsons’ the other day when that big storm came up so sudden; and, if he didn’t pull off his coat and go out into the hay field with Martin and help to hustle the hay in. Real good help he was too, Martin says—stronger than you’d think and quick as a cat. And then the boys got to wrestling out in the barn; and if he didn’t lay them all out on their backs, as easy as rolling off a log. They were some surprised and ashamed; but he said he’d taken lessons of a Japanee and that the Japs beat the world for wrestling and that, if the boys would like to learn, he’d teach them all the tricks he knew.