"You can call me anything you're a mind to," she answered calmly. She was near-sighted, and had always worn spectacles. She took them off and laid them on her knee. The parson moved involuntarily in his chair. He remembered how she had used to do that when they were talking intimately, so that his eager look might not embarrass her. "Nothing makes much difference when folks get to be as old as you and I are."
"I don't feel old," said the parson resentfully. "I do not! And you don't look so."
"Well, I am. We're past our youth. We've got to the point where the only way to renew it is to look out for the young ones."
The parson had always had with her a way of reading her thought and bursting out boyishly into betrayal of his own.
"Mary Ellen," he cried, "I never should have explained it so, but Isabel looks like you!"
She smiled sadly. "I guess men make themselves think 'most anything they want to," she answered. "There may be a family look, but I can't see it. She's tall, too, and I was always a pint o' cider—so father said."
"She's got the same look in her eyes," pursued the parson hotly. "I've always thought so, ever since she was a little girl."
"If you begun to notice it then," she responded, with the same gentle calm, "you'd better by half ha' been thinking of your own wife and her eyes. I believe they were black."
"Mary Ellen, how hard you are on me! You did't use to be. You never were hard on anybody. You wouldn't have hurt a fly."
Her face contracted slightly. "Perhaps I wouldn't! perhaps I wouldn't! But I've had a good deal to bear this afternoon, and maybe I do feel a little different towards you from what I ever have felt. I've been hearing a loose-tongued woman tell how my own niece has been made town-talk because a man old enough to know better was running after her. I said, years ago, I never would come into this place while you was in it; but when I heard that, I felt as if Providence had marked out the way. I knew I was the one to step into the breach. So I had Tim harness up and bring me over, and here I am. William, I don't want you should make a mistake at your time of life!"