“I’m willing to warn you, though,” she conceded generously, “that Ezra needs disinfecting as much as he needs moral suasion. Nobody will ever burrow through to his soul until he’s had a bath.”
It was late in the afternoon when Archibald turned up at the shack, and Pegeen, arrayed in one of the cheapest of the new frocks and very dressy as to hair ribbons and shoes, came down the path to meet him.
“It was a shame for them to scare you off so you didn’t even come home to dinner,” she said indignantly, “but you needn’t have been afraid. I shooed them all away at half-past eleven; they had to go home and get their own dinners anyway.”
“I wasn’t afraid of my neighbors. I was gardening for one of them.”
For a moment she looked puzzled. Then she knew.
“Miss Moran! Well, if she isn’t the greatest! She could make anybody garden; was it flowers or vegetables?”
“Too bad,” said Peg, regretfully. “Of course it’s all nice and exciting and like helping God with his chores, but flowers seem best. They’re so perfectly lovely when they come up and blossom—but then, I love string beans, don’t you? Only they’re just green and I think it’s more fun to help make something bright colored.”
“Did you ever have a garden of your own?” Archibald asked. They had reached the shack now and he dropped down on the doorstep and filled his pipe. Pegeen sat down beside him, after carefully turning up the abbreviated skirt of her new dress.
“No use dirtying it any faster than I have to,” she explained. “Every washing takes it out of them even when they aren’t pink. No, I never had a garden—what you’d call a real garden. We never had much garden. Sometimes Dad would put in corn or potatoes but mostly he forgot, and if he didn’t forget them, he did after he’d put them in, and I didn’t have much time to take care of them. I had some poppies once though, perfectly wonderful poppies. Miss Moran gave me the seeds. I hadn’t ever planted any flower seeds at all till one day I was down at her house and she was working in the flower garden and let me help. I sowed some seed of those great big blue larkspur—delphiniums she calls them, but I think larkspur’s nicest, don’t you?—and some poppies too. Poppies have got the cunningest baby seeds that you don’t dare cover up warm at all for fear you’ll choke them to death. She let me take some poppy seed home, and I dug a place right outside Mother’s window. She was sick then, you know, and after the poppies blossomed, I used to get Mother up every single day to see them. They were the gladdest, brightest, danciest things, but they used to make Mother sort of sad sometimes.”