He had learned a great deal about her past, and held it mirrored in his
memory. The general picture of it rose before his eyes now, as he leaned on
the fence this pleasant afternoon in May and watched her restoring to its
place, with delicate strokes of her finger-tips, the lock of her soft,
shining hair.How could any one so fine have thriven amid conditions so
exhausting?
Those hard toiling fingers, now grasping the heavy hoe, once
used to tinkle over the spinet; the small, sensitive feet, now covered with
coarse shoe-packs tied with leather thongs, once shone in rainbow hues of
satin slippers and silken hose. A sunbonnet for the tiara of osprey plumes;
a dress spun and woven by her own hand out of her own flax, instead of the
stiff brocade; log hut for manor-house; one negro boy instead of troops of
servants: to have possessed all that, to have been brought down to all this,
and not to have been ruined by it, never to have lost distinction or been
coarsened by coarseness never to have parted with grace of manner or grace
of spirit, or been bent or broken or overclouded in character and
ideals,--it was all this that made her in his eyes a great woman, a great
lady.
He held her in such reverence that, as he caught the serious look in her
eyes at his impulsive question, he was sorry he had asked it: the last thing
he could ever have thought of doing would have been to intrude upon the
privacy of her reflections.
"What was I thinking of?"
There was a short silence and then she turned to him eagerly, brightly, with
an entire change of voice and expression-"But the news from town--you haven't told me the news."
"Oh, there is any amount of news!" he cried, glad of a chance to retreat
from his intrusion. And he began lightly, recklessly: "A bookbinder has opened a shop on Cross Street--a capital hand at the
business, by the name of Leischman--and he will bind books at the regular
market prices in exchange for linen rags, maple sugar, and goose-quills. I
advise you to keep an eye on your geese, if the major once takes a notion to
have his old Shakespeare and his other volumes, that had their bindings
knocked off in crossing the Alleghanies, elegantly rebound. You can tell him
also that after a squirrel-hunt in Bourbon County the farmers counted
scalps, and they numbered five thousand five hundred and eighty-nine; so
that he is not the only one who has trouble with his corn. And then you can
tell him that on the common the other day Nelson Tapp and Willis Tandy had a
fearful fight over a land-suit. Now it was Tandy and Tapp; now it was Tapp
and Tandy; but they went off at last and drowned themselves and the memory
of the suit in a bowl of sagamity.""And there is no news for me, I suppose?"