Mr. Bodger’s business was making socks. Mr. Hackfeather may have been wearing a pair of socks of Mr. Bodger’s make at that very instant, yet had he never heard of Bodger; nor did Mr. Bodger know that any part of his growing business was built up on the money of a man named Hackfeather.
To say that a party of Brooklyn people, conducted in an old-fashioned carryall, by an elderly woman of austere demeanor, entered the deep pine wood in a chilled twilight of early Spring certainly ought to convey an impression of gloom. And certainly gloom of the deepest enshrouded the beginning of that ride. Diligent inquiry elicited from the elderly woman that she was, as the Wicks supposed, Miss Hipsy, the care-taker; that she had received their telegram, or she wouldn’t have been there nohow; that she had had a contrack with the late owner of the premises; that she had lived up to it, whatever other people hed or hedn’t done; that what she had done she would do, and that if she was not satisfactory to other parties, or if other parties was not satisfactory to her, which was most likely to be the case, she was willin’, as far as she was concerned, to take herself off just as soon as she could; that she thanked Providence she had folks in Ellenville she could go to, as respectable as some, that she could go to and no obligations to nobody, and that she was not aware that her contrack called for no general conversation.
Now this extremely discouraging way and manner of Miss Hipsy’s was entirely general and impersonal, like dampness or a close smell in a long unused house. Congenitally sub-acid, a failure to accomplish any sort of an early or late love affair had completely soured her, and many years of solitude had put a gray-green coating of mildew over her moral nature. But the Wicks did not know this, and, remembering their peculiar position, it made them feel extremely uncomfortable.
But the moon came out in the soft Spring sky, and the mists of the evening rolled away, and a great silvery radiance wrapped the cathedral-like spires and pinnacles of the broad spreading pine forest, and, after awhile, the rough corduroy road grew smoother, and the baby stopped crying and went to sleep, and they were all, except Miss Hipsy, beginning to nod off just a little when the wheels crunched on a driveway of white pebbles, and they looked up to see a spacious low building standing out black against the sky, except where a half a dozen brightly lit windows winked at them like friendly eyes.