A VIEW OF THE WOODS
479
fist at the man on the bulldozer. He waved at her and went on about
his
business. More sense in her little finger than all the rest of that
tribe in their heads put together, the old man said to himself, and
watched with pride as she started back to him.
She had a head of thick, very fine, sand-colored hair-the exact
kind he had had when he had had any-that grew straight and was
cut just above her eyes and down the sides of her cheeks to the tips
of her ears so that it formed a kind of door opening onto the central
part of her face. Her glasses were silver-rimmed like his and she
even walked the way he did, stomach forward, with a careful abrupt
gait, something between a rock and a shuffle. She was walking so
close to the edge of the embankment that the outside of her right
foot was flush with it.
"I said don't walk so close to the edge," he called; "you fall
off there and you won't live to see the day this place gets built up."
He was always very careful to see that she avoided dangers. He
would not allow her to sit in snakey places or put her hands on
bushes that might hide hornets.
She didn't move an inch. She had a habit of his of not hearing
what she didn't want to hear and since this was a little trick he had
taught her himself, he had to admire the way she practiced it. He
foresaw that in her own old age it would serve her well. She reached
the car and climbed back onto the hood without a word and put her
feet back on his shoulders where she had had them before, as if he
were no more than a part of the automobile. Her attention returned
to the far bulldozer.
"Remember what you won't get
if
you don't mind," her grand–
father remarked.
He was a strict disciplinarian but he had never whipped her.
There were some children, like the first six Pittses, whom he thought
should be whipped once a week on principle, but there were other
ways to control intelligent children and he had never laid a rough
hand on Mary Fortune. Furthermore, he had never allowed her
mother or her brothers and sisters so much as to slap her. The elder
Pitts was a different matter.
He was a man of a nasty temper and of ugly unreasonable re–
sentments. Time and again, Mr. Fortune's heart had pounded to see
him rise slowly from his place at the table-not the head, Mr. For-
