"Because I am," said Lizzie Ann. "So you are, too. Mariana Blake never'll marry in the world. She ain't that kind."
"I don't know why she ain't," said her friend, in an argumentative tone of the sort adopted to carry on brilliantly a conversation of which both participants know the familiar moves. "Mariana's a real pretty woman, prettier by far than she was when she's a girl. I know she's gettin' along. She was forty-three last April, but age ain't everything. Look at aunt Grinnell. She married when she's fifty-three, and she was homely 's a hedge fence and hadn't any faculty. Nor she didn't bring him a cent, either."
"Well, nobody'd say Mariana was homely. But she won't marry. Nor she wouldn't if she was eighteen. She ain't that kind."
"There, I've got it laced up," said Sophronia. She seemed to settle into an easier attitude, and Mariana could hear the scratch of the heel as she thrust the rehabilitated foot afar from her on the lichened rock. "Well, I guess you're right, but I don't know why it's so, after all. If I was a man, seems if I should think Jake Preble, now, was a real likely fellow to marry."
"Jake Preble!" Such distaste animated the tone of that response that Mariana involuntarily raised herself from her listening posture, and the dishes clinked. "What's that? Didn't you hear suthin'? Why, Jake Preble's a kind of a hind wheel. He goes rollin' along after t'others, never askin' why nor wherefore, and he thinks it's his own free will. He never so much as dreams 'tis the horse that's haulin' him."
"Well, what is 't he thinks 'tis that's haulin' him?" asked Sophronia, who was not imaginative.
"Why, all I mean is, he don't take things for what they're wuth. He believes every goose's a swan till it up and honks, and he's jest as likely to think a swan's a goose."
"You don't mean he ain't suited with Mariana?"
"No, no. I mean Mariana's cosseted him and swep' his path afore him, carryin' his victuals and cleanin' up the house when he's out hayin' or cuttin' wood, till he thinks it ain't so bad to bach it after all. If she'd just let him alone after Hattie died, and starved him out, he'd ha'nted her place oftener'n she's been over to his, and 'twouldn't ha' been long before he learnt the taste of her apple-pies and where they ought to be made. Now he knows they're to be picked mostly off'n his kitchen table when he comes in from work."
"Mercy, you don't mean to say you think it's all victuals, do you?" inquired Sophronia, with her unctuous laugh. "You never had much opinion o' menfolks, anyways, Lizzie Ann."