"Oh, no, I ain't, Myron," she responded eagerly, with an earnest motion toward him, as if she besought him to put faith in her. "It ain't me that's doin' it."
"It ain't you? Who is it, then?"
"Why, it's my double personality. Ain't I just told you so?"
Myron stood gazing at her in the futility of comprehension he had felt years ago, when Caddie, who had been "a great reader," as the neighbors said, before the avalanche of household cares had overwhelmed her, propounded to him, while he was drawing off his boots for an hour of twilight somnolence before going to bed, problems that, he knew, no man could answer. Neither were they to be illumined by Holy Writ, for he had offered that loophole of exit, and Caddie had shaken her head at him disconsolately, and implied that the prophets would not do. But when she had seemed to forget that interrogative attitude toward life, he had settled down to unquestioning content in knowing he had the best housekeeper in the neighborhood. Now here it was again, the spectre of her queerness rising to distress him.
She looked at him with wide, affrighted eyes.
"You set here with me a spell," she adjured him. "I'll lay down on the sofy, and you take the big rocker. If you see it comin' up in me, you kinder say somethin', and mebbe it'll go away."
Myron, though in extreme unwillingness, did as he was bidden. He wanted to bundle the whole troop of her imaginings out of doors, and plod off, like a sane man, to his fencing; but somehow her earnestness itself forbade. When they were established, she on the sofa, with her bright eyes piercing him, and he seated at an angle where a nurse might easiest wait upon a patient's needs, the absurdity of it all swept over him. The clock was ticking irritatingly behind him. He looked at his watch, and took assurance from the vision of the flying day.
"Now, Caddie," said he, in that specious soothing we accord to children, "you lay right still, and I'll go out a spell and do a few chores, and then mebbe I'll come in and see how you be."
Caddie put out a hand, and fastened it upon his in an inexorable clasp.
"No, Myron," said she, "you ain't goin'. If I should be left here to myself, and it come up in me, I dunno what I might do."