Peggy O'Neal

by Alfred Henry Lewis

“You look like a schoolgirl,” said I, in comment. “You will be now more than ever the child with me.”

“'Tis a good uniform to walk in,” said Peg, “and to balk mire and water.”

Peg's mother was in no strait of weakened health more than stood proper with her days. But she was grown peevish and with nerves on edge to see her daughter; for since rout and dinner and reception made such claim on Peg, she had not visited the good old lady as often as was her wont.

And now when we were there, the old mother would hear no soon word for our departure; we must stay to supper; Peg should cook for us, she said.

It was not without surprise that I observed how this command to turn herself a cook would fit with Peg's temper like a glove. In the first, Peg hung upon uncertainties; the paths were bad, there were mire and pool. But when told that she should cook for me, her face brightened and she was instantly moved to recall that a great moon would shine and so put those night-dangers of pool and mire to rest.

So patent stood Peg's satisfaction in her new duties that, as she would heap and heap again my plate—scarce eating a morsel herself—I was driven to ask reason.

“And you don't know?” said Peg, pausing with a new-baked tin of light-bread in her little hands—these latter white with flour. “It is because this is the first natural woman thing I've done for months. You may be very sure, watch-dog, whenever you see me bowing and scraping at a reception, or dismissing some Pigeon-breast from my royal presence at a ball, that I would give the stockings off my feet to be busy about a fireplace instead, and cooking bread and meat for you. You see, I am so much more the woman than the lady. There is my defect.”

“And was it that,” said I, attacking a second steak with the fury of a farm-hand, while Peg glowed to see me dispatch it, “was it that to teach you to warn me I must be a man rather than a gentleman when I dealt with you?”

“Now I shouldn't wonder,” replied Peg, going for more coffee.

This kitchen mood of Peg's—and somehow I liked it as much as ever she did—and her word for it how she preferred cookery to balls, set me to put questions as we twined along our path among the trees on homeward journey. The night, as Peg foretold when she so favored supper-getting, was full of a white radiance that one might read print by, for the air was as clear as glass and the moon both big and round.