AUNT SARAH WHIPPLE'S coachman drove Kate and Joe in the wagonette through the iron gates of Cedarmere, past the lodge, past weeping copper beeches pouring down on the velvet lawn in molten fountains, past wool-work flower beds. There were circles and stars edged with beet-red, cocoa-brown, and yellow-green ornamental foliage, then little rims of Reckett's-blue lobelias surrounding cold pink begonias with wax stems, or heliotrope, widely spaced in rich finely crumbled earth. The earth at Cedarmere was always black and moist, even when other people's flower beds were hard, pale tan. Aunt Sarah kept an eye on her garden. On summer mornings after she had eaten her oatmeal and read the political news in the paper she went out-of-doors, and where the wrens were perching on dipping sprays of grapevine, wrenlike Aunt Sarah perched on green iron grapevines twisted into seats, and made the gardeners, busy in the borders, wish they had never been born.
The lawns, the glimpsed grape house, Henderson's bottle-green livery with its silver buttons, affected Kate so that she began to make polite remarks to Joe and to Henderson's back in her society voice, from nervousness, telling them that it was cold for October, that the
