Free The Rose Garden by Maeve Brennan

unquestioningly, as he accepted everything about Isobel. “My wife is the most mature human being I have ever met,” he said sometimes. Then, too, Isobel was never jealous, because jealousy was childish. And she was never angry. “But if you understand, really understand, you simply cannot be angry with people,” she would say, laughing.
    Now she set about charming Miss Ellis, and Edwin had settled back lazily to watch them when the second waif, Vincent Lace, appeared in the doorway. He sprinted impetuously across the carpet and, without glancing to the right or to the left, fell on both knees before Susan, who was curled on the hearth rug, undressing her new doll.
    â€œAh, the grand little girl!” cried Vincent. “Sure she’s the living image of her lovely mother! And what name have they put on you, love?”
    â€œSusan,” said the child coldly, and she got up and went to perch under the spreading branches of the splendid tree that blazed gorgeously from ceiling to floor between two tall windows. Beyond the windows, the narrow street lay chill and gray, except when the wind, blowing down the hill, swept before it a ragged leaf of Christmas tissue paper, red or green, or a streamer of colored ribbon.
    Undisturbed by the child’s desertion, Vincent rocked back on his plump behind, and wrapped his arms around his knees, and favored his host, then Miss Ellis, and, finally, Isobel with a dazzling view of his small, decaying teeth.
    â€œWell, Isobel,” he murmured, “little Isobel of the peat-brown eyes. You still have the lovely eyes, Isobel. But what am I thinking of at all!” he shouted, bounding to his feet. “Sure your husband will think me a terrible fellow entirely. Forgive me, Isobel, but the little girl took my breath away. She’s yourself all over again.”
    â€œEdwin, this is our Irish poet,” Isobel said. “Vincent Lace, a dear friend of Father’s. I see you still wear the red bow tie, Vincent, your old trademark. I noticed it first thing when I ran into you the other day. As a matter of fact, it was the tie that caught my attention. You were never without it, were you?”
    â€œAh, we all have our little conceits, Isobel,” Vincent said, smiling disarmingly at Edwin.
    Vincent’s face appeared to have been vigorously stretched, either by too much pain or by too much laughter, and when he was not smiling his expression was one of dignified truculence. He was more obviously combed and scrubbed than a sixty-three-year-old man should be, and his bright-blue eyes were anxious. Twenty years ago, he had come from Ireland to do a series of lectures onIrish literature at colleges and universities all over the United States. In his suitcase, he carried several copies of the two thin volumes of poetry that had won him his contract.
    â€œMy poems drive the fellows at home stark mad,” Vincent had confided to Isobel’s father, the first time he visited their house. “I pay no attention to the modern rubbish at all. All that crowd thinks of is making pretty-sounding imitations of Yeats and his bunch. Yeats, Yeats, Yeats, that’s all they know. But my masters are long since dead. I go back in spirit to those grand eighteenth-century souls who wandered the bogs and hills of our unfortunate country, and who broke bread with the people, and who wrote out of the heart of the people.”
    At this point (for it was a speech Isobel and the others were often to hear), he would leap to his feet and intone in his native Irish tongue the names of the men he admired, and with every syllable his voice would grow more laden, until at the last it seemed that he would have to release a sob, but he never did, although his small blue eyes would be wet and angry. With his wild black hair, his red tie, and his sharp tongue, he quickly became a general favorite, and when his tour was over, he accepted an offer from one of the New York