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Many a plump red face was thrust close up to his many a pair of round staring eyes was puckered up with mirth as he spoke: the teamster in his olive-coloured smock, the hedger in his shirt-sleeves, and the little bumpkins who had snatched a holiday from scaring the crows, all seemed, by their delight, to be capable of entering into the baronet's method of argumentation.
He stayed on the roof until all was still below, and finally descended, with quite a new feeling about his neighbour. Her voice, like her figure, inspired respect, if one did not choose to call it admiration. Her door was shut, the transom was dark; nothing remained of her but the obtrusive trunk, unrightfully taking up room in the narrow hall. For two days Hedger didn't see her.
Early in May, Hedger learned that he was to have a new neighbour in the rear apartment two rooms, one large and one small, that faced the west. His studio was shut off from the larger of these rooms by double doors, which, though they were fairly tight, left him a good deal at the mercy of the occupant.
She told Hedger to be of good cheer, for he had got the right woman for the job, and showed him a great leather strap she wore about her wrist to prevent dislocation of tendons. She swished about the place, scattering dust and splashing soapsuds, while he watched her in nervous despair. He stood over Lizzie and made her scour the sink, directing her roughly, then paid her and got rid of her.
The coming golden time is neatly hinted at. Home Rule will pay for all: When it comes, you no longer shall lie in a ditch, Every beggar among you at once shall be rich; The hedger and ditcher shall have an estate, And drive his four horses, and dine off his plate. What! you won't?
They were discursively excited for a week when Rose Larsen was followed from the surface-car to the door by an unknown man; and they were unhappily excited when, without explanations, slim, daring Jennie Cassavant was suddenly asked to leave the Home Club; and they had a rose-lighted dinner when Livy Hedger announced her engagement to a Newark lawyer.
The temptation to glance at the wild divinings of dreamy-witted women from the point of view of the practical man, was aided by the intense frigidity of the atmosphere in leading him to criticize a sex not much used to the exercise of brains. 'And they hate railways! He associated them, in the matter of intelligence, with Andrew Hedger and Company.
Though Hedger was sulking, his eye could not help seeing the low blue welter of the sea, the arrested bathers, standing in the surf, their arms and legs stained red by the dropping sun, all shading their eyes and gazing upward at the slowly falling silver star.
In winter, the low-lying lands are seldom visited by the peasantry, except when the dairymaid drives the cattle to and fro, or the hedger trims the undergrowth along the ditches.
He was cold, hungry, dispirited, and astoundingly stricken with an incapacity to separate any of his thoughts from old Andrew Hedger. Nature was at her pranks upon him. He left the garden briskly, as to the legs, and reluctantly. He would have liked to know whether Diana had recently visited the house, or was expected.
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