The Solitary Summer

On a May evening, standing at the sun-dial, she announces she means to spend the whole summer alone — no guests, no callers, nothing but the garden. The Man of Wrath removes his cigar and advises her not to get her feet damp. He takes to tapping the barometer, shaking his head at cloudless skies, setting off for the farm in a mackintosh on hot mornings, waiting for the wet week that will let him say the words dearest to the married heart.

What follows is wallflowers and tea roses, three hopeless gardeners, three small daughters named for the months, and a September that billets thirty officers in the house. Beneath it runs an argument, made in the driest key, that a woman alone is neither pitiable nor idle.