One of the things which Mrs. Abram Pantin's worst enemy would have had to admit in her favor was that, strictly speaking, she was not a gossip, though this virtue was due as much to policy as to principle. It was her custom, however, to retain in her memory such morsels of common knowledge news as she accumulated during the day with which to entertain Mr. Pantin at evening dinner, for she observed that if his thoughts could be diverted from business it aided his digestion and he slept better, so she strove always to have some bright topic to introduce at the table.
Having said a silent grace, Mr. Pantin inquired mechanically: "Will you have a chop, Prissy?" Since there were only two he did not use the plural.
Mrs. Pantin looked across the fern centerpiece and made a mouth as she regarded the chop doubtfully.
"I'm afraid I am eating too much meat lately."
Impaled on a tine of the fork, the chop was of a thinness to have enabled one to read through it without much difficulty.
Mr. Pantin placed the chop on his own plate with some little alacrity.
As his wife took one of the two dainty rolls concealed in a fringed napkin on the handsome silver bread tray, she endeavored to recall what it was in particular that she had saved to tell him. Oh, yes!
"What do you think I heard to-day, Abram?"
Abram was figuring interest and murmured absently: "I have no idea."
"They say," in her sprightliest manner, "that that girl who killed her lover was refused credit at every store in Prouty. No one would trust her for even five dollars' worth of groceries. Rather pathetic, isn't it?"
Mr. Pantin looked up quickly.
"Who told you that?"
"Everyone seems to know it."
Mr. Pantin frowned slightly.
"If you mean Miss Prentice, I wouldn't speak of her in that fashion, Priscilla."
"Mormon Joe's Kate, then, if you like that better," replied Mrs. Pantin, nettled.
"Or 'Mormon Joe's Kate,' either," curtly.
"So sorry; I didn't know you knew her. Do you?"
Mr. Pantin, who at his own table was given the privilege of taking bones in his fingers, pointed the chop at her.
"Let me tell you something, Priscilla," impressively. "Someone who is cleverer than I am has said that it is never safe to snub a pretty girl, because there is always the possibility that she'll marry well and be able to retaliate. The same thing applies to one who has brains and is in earnest. I've made it a rule never to disparage the efforts of a person who had a definite purpose and works to attain it. It's about a fifty-to-one shot that he'll land--sometime."