Now he sat on the piazza of his hardware store, his shoes on the planking beside him, and his pudgy toes wriggling like the trained fingers of an eminent pianist.  It was a knotty problem.  An ordinary problem Scattergood could solve with shoes on feet, but let the matter take on eminent difficulty and his toes must be given freedom and elbow room, as one might say.  Later in life his wife, Mandy, after he had married her, tried to cure him of this habit, which she considered vulgar, but at this point she failed signally.

The facts about Grandmother Penny were, not that she was consciously ill treated.  Her bodily comfort was seen to.  She was well fed and reasonably clothed, and had a good bed in which to sleep.  Where she was sinned against was in this:  that her family looked upon her white hair and her wrinkles and arrived at the erroneous conclusion that her interest in life was gone—­in short, that she was content to cumber the earth and to wait for the long sleep.  To them she was simply one who tarries and is content.  Scattergood looked into her sharp, old eyes, eyes that were capable of sudden gleams of humor or flashes of anger, and he knew.  He knew that death seemed as distant to Grandmother Penny as it had seemed fifty years ago.  He knew that her interest in life was as keen, her yearning to participate in the affairs of life as strong, as they had been when Grandfather Penny—­now long gone to his reward—­had driven his horse over the hills with one hand while he utilized the other arm for more important and delightful purposes.

Scattergood was remembering his own grandmother.  He had known her as no other living soul had known her, because she had been his boyhood intimate, his defender, always his advocate, and because the boyish love which he had given her had made his eyes keen to perceive.  His parents had fancied Grandma Baines to be content when she was in constant revolt.  They had supposed that life meant nothing more to her now than to sit in a comfortable rocker and to knit interminable stockings and to remember past years.  Scattergood knew that the present compelled her interest and that the future thrilled her.  She wanted to participate in life, to be in the midst of events—­to continue to live so long as the power of movement and of perception remained to her.  He was now able to see that the old lady had done much to mold his character, and as he recalled incident after incident his face wore a softer, more melancholy expression than Coldriver was wont to associate with it.  He was regretting that in his thoughtless youth he had failed to accomplish more to make gladder his grandmother’s few remaining years.

“I calc’late,” said Scattergood to himself—­but aloud—­“that I’ll kind of substitute Grandmother Penny for Grandma Baines—­pervidin’ Grandma Baines is fixed so’s she kin see; more’n likely she’ll understand what I’m up to, and it’ll tickle her—­I’m goin’ to up and borrow me a grandmother.”