His Wife Was An Austere Woman, Who Had Once Been Kindly, And
Perhaps Handsome.
Very many years of toil had taken the elasticity out of step and
voice.
She looked for nothing better than everlasting work - the
chafing detail of housework - and then a grave somewhere up the
hill among the blackberries and the pines.
But in her grim way she sympathized with her eldest daughter, a
small and silent maiden of eighteen, who had thoughts very far
from the meals she tended and the pans she scoured.
We stumbled into the household at a crisis, and there was a deal
of downright humanity in that same. A bad, wicked dress-maker
had promised the maiden a dress in time for a to-morrow's
rail-way journey, and though the barefooted Georgy, who stood in
very wholesome awe of his sister, had scoured the woods on a pony
in search, that dress never arrived. So, with sorrow in her
heart and a hundred Sister-Anne glances up the road, she waited
upon the strangers and, I doubt not, cursed them for the wants
that stood between her and her need for tears. It was a genuine
little tragedy. The mother, in a heavy, passionless voice,
rebuked her impatience, yet sat up far into the night, bowed over
a heap of sewing for the daughter's benefit.
These things I beheld in the long marigold-scented twilight and
whispering night, loafing round the little house with California,
who un-folded himself like a lotus to the moon, or in the little
boarded bunk that was our bedroom, swap-ping tales with Portland
and the old man.
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