“What ails the boy?” asked Martin, laughing as he raised his hat and joined the group on the porch.
“Martin,” said Amanda after he had greeted Isabel and took his place on a chair near her, “you’d do me an everlasting favor if you’d turn that brother of mine up on your knees and spank him.”
“Now that I’d like to see!” spoke up Millie.
“You would, Millie? You’d like to see me get that? After all the coal I’ve carried out of the cellar for you, and the other ways I’ve helped make your burden lighter--you’d sit and see me humiliated! Ingratitude! Even Millie turns against me. I’m going away from this crowd where I’m not appreciated.”
“Oh, you needn’t affect such an air of martyrdom,” his sister told him. “I know you have a book half read; you want to get back to that.”
“Say,” said Uncle Amos, “these women, if they don’t beat all! They ferret all the weak spots out a man. I say it ain’t right.”
Later in the evening the older members of the household left the porch and the trio of eternal trouble--two girls and a man--were left alone. It was then the city girl exerted her most alluring wiles to be entertaining. The man had eyes and ears for her only. As Mrs. Landis once said, he looked past Amanda and did not see her. She sat in the shadow and bit her lip as her plumed knight paid court before the beauty and charm of another. The heart of the simple country girl ached. But Isabel smiled, flattered and charmed and did it so adeptly that instead of being obnoxious to the country boy it thrilled and held him like the voice of a Circe. They never noticed Amanda’s silence. She could lean back in her chair and dream. She remembered the story of Ulysses and his wax-filled ears that saved him from the sirens; the tale of Orpheus, who drowned their alluring voices by playing on his instrument a music sweeter than theirs--ah, that was her only hope! That somewhere, deep in the heart of the man she loved was a music surpassing in sweetness the music of the shallow girl’s voice which now seemed to sway him to her will. “If he is a man worth loving,” she thought, “he’ll see through the surface glamour of a girl like that.” It was scant consolation, for she knew that only too frequently do noble men give their lives into the precarious keeping of frivolous, butterfly women.
“Why so pensive?” the voice of Isabel pierced her revery.
“Me--oh, I haven’t had a chance to get a word in edgewise.”
“I was telling Mr. Landis he should go on with his studies. A correspondence course would be splendid for him if he can’t get away from the farm for regular college work.”