"Yes," returned Susan, brief for once, "it certainly is."
"It's a very sad world, I think," contributed Gran'ma Mullins with a heavy, heavy sigh. "My goodness, to think this time last spring Hiram was spading up the potato patch! And now where is he?"
"Nobody knows," answered Susan. "See how many years it was till Jathrop come back. But I do hope for your sake, Gran'ma Mullins, that when Hiram does come back he won't take it into his head to buy this house and build it over for you."
Gran'ma Mullins looked at Mrs. Macy, and Mrs. Macy looked back at Gran'ma Mullins, and a message flashed and was answered in the glances.
"Well, Susan," said Gran'ma Mullins with neighborly interest, "you do see that the house needs fixing up, don't you?"
Susan was the owner and Mrs. Macy only the tenant, and the implication was not at all pleasing to her. She turned with the air of the weariest worm that had ever done so and gave Gran'ma Mullins a look that could only be translated as an admonition to mind her own business. Whereupon Gran'ma Mullins promptly subsided, and the subject did not come up again.
It was on a Monday—the very next Monday—that the workmen arrived and set to work to demolish the outer casing of the homes of Susan and Mrs. Lathrop. Susan went up and stood about for an hour, viewing the way they did it with great but resigned scorn. She went every day thereafter, and her heart was rent at the sight of the sacrilege. Then, to add to her woe, Gran'ma Mullins proved less soothing than had been expected, and Susan suffered keenly at her hands.
"Oh, Mrs. Lathrop," she said one morning, when the exigencies of shopping left the two old friends full freedom of intercourse, "if I'm going to live in that house for this whole summer, the first thing that I'll have to do is either to change Gran'ma Mullins or change me! I can see that. Why, I never heard anything like Gran'ma Mullins' views on Hiram. You've heard Mrs. Macy, and I've told you what Lucy's told me whenever I've met her, but I never had no idea it was anything like what it is. I'm stark, raving crazy hearing about Hiram. Gran'ma Mullins says no child was ever like Hiram, and I begin to wonder if it ain't so. No child ever made such an impression on his mother before,—I can take my Bible oath on that, for she's talking about him from the time I wake till long after I'm asleep,—and she remembers things in the stillness of the night and wakes me up to hear 'em for fear she'll forget 'em before morning. Last night she was up at two to tell me how Hiram used to shut his eyes before he went to sleep when he was a baby. She said he had a different way of doing it from any other child that's ever been born. He picked it all up by himself. She couldn't possibly tell me just how he did it, but it was most remarkable. He had it in May and well into June the year he was born, but along in July he began to lose it, and by October he opened and shut just like other people's babies. That's what I was woke up to hear, Mrs. Lathrop, and Herod was a sweet and good-tempered mother of ten compared to me as I listened. And then at daybreak if she didn't come in again to explain as Hiram was so different from all other babies that he crept before he walked, and the first of his trying to walk he climbed up a chair leg."
"Why, Jathrop—" volunteered Mrs. Lathrop.
"Of course. They all do. But I must say I don't see how I'm going to stand it till my house is ready to receive me back with open bosom if this is the way she's going on straight along. I wouldn't stay with Mrs. Macy because I was tired of hearing what she said Gran'ma Mullins said about Hiram, but it never once struck me that if I stayed with Gran'ma Mullins I'd have it all to hear straight from the fountain mouth. My lands alive, Mrs. Lathrop, you never hear the beat! Hiram used to wrinkle up his face when she washed it, and he never wanted to have a bath. And he used to bring mud turtles into the house; and when she thinks of that and how now he's off for the Klondike, she says she feels like going straight after him. She says she could be very useful in the Klondike. She could polish his pick and his sled-runners, and hang up his snowy things, and wash out his gold and his clothes. She says she can't just see how they wash out gold, but she knows how to polish silver, and she says mother-love like hers can pick up anything. She goes on and on till I feel like going to the Klondike myself. I'm getting a great deal of sympathy for Lucy. Lucy always said she could have been happy with Hiram—maybe—if it hadn't been for his mother. Lucy's got no kind of tender feeling for Gran'ma Mullins, and I certainly don't feel to blame her none."