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"I am doing my very best," she said, a spot of pink flickering on her cheek; "I work as hard as I can, but you see I am so ignorant. I could not have learned anything about art in Willowfield. But people are so good to me people who know a great deal. There is one gentleman who comes sometimes to see Mr. Barnard at the studio. He is so wonderful, it seems to me.
But for the sake of the little old woman ending her days quietly in Willowfield and for the sake of Margery's memory yes, he wanted to save the child's memory but for these things there would be no use in making any effort to secure the papers. Yet he was conscious of a dread of the moment when he should take them into his hand. Stamps turned eager, miserable eyes upon him as he came in.
Before he had arrived he had been spoken of rather slightingly as "the young man," but when he rose in the pulpit on the eventful Sunday morning, such a thrill ran through the congregation as had not stirred it at its devotions for many a summer day. Mrs. Stornaway mentally decided for him upon the spot. "He is of one of our oldest families," she said. "This is what Willowfield wants."
If mistakes were made in Willowfield society, they were always made by the masculine members of it. It was Mr.
She never committed a breach of discretion and she never formed in any degree an element of special interest. She greatly respected her father's position as a successful man, and left it to be vaguely due to the approbation of Willowfield.
The New England town of Willowfield was a place of great importance. Its importance religious, intellectual, and social was its strong point. It took the liberty of asserting this with unflinching dignity. Other towns might endeavour to struggle to the front, and, indeed, did so endeavour, but Willowfield calmly held its place and remained unmoved.
Baird possessed this temperament, and his home was a centre of all that was most living. It was not the ordinary Willowfield household. The larger outer world came and went. When Latimer went to it he was swept on by new currents and felt himself warmed and fed. There had been scarcely any day during years in which the two men had not met.
"They belong," it was said, with the temperateness of true dignity, "to our old families, and that is something, you know, even in America." "It has struck me," an observing male visitor once remarked, "that there are a good many women in Willowfield, and that altogether it has a feminine tone."
It was awed by the Willowfield Times, it revered the button factory, and bitterly envied the carriages driven and the occasional festivities held by the families of the representatives of these monopolies. The carriages were sober and middle-aged, and so were the parties, but to Janway's Mills they illustrated wealth and gaiety.
"I hope he won't begin to be lured by things which might produce catastrophe." Once he came and spent a long, hot summer evening with her, and when he went away she had arrived at another decision, and it made her wretched. "He is lured," she thought. "I cannot help him, and God knows Willowfield could not. After this perhaps the Deluge."
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