The tone was expressive enough. Mrs. Lathrop shook her head sadly. Then both were silent.
XII
SUSAN CLEGG'S DISAPPEARANCE
The "building-over" of Susan Clegg and her friend, Mrs. Lathrop, was completed during the second week in December, and in less than twenty-four hours they were once more established in their own dwellings, surrounded by their own goods and chattels. For only the briefest space, however, did Miss Clegg remain where she was put. Then she hurried through the passageway afforded by the connecting pergola and burst excitedly into her neighbor's brand new kitchen in the very center of which sat Mrs. Lathrop in her old-gold-plush stationary rocker, calmly surveying her domiciliary spick-and-spanness. On her lap lay a just-opened letter; but for once the scrupulously observing Miss Clegg failed to observe. She was too full of fresh trials.
"I d'n know whatever sins I committed in this world, Mrs. Lathrop," she began, dropping into the nearest chair and facing her friend in an upright, a little bent forward attitude that was clearly pugnacious, "that I should have these things visited upon me. The Lord knows, just the same as you do, as I've always been a good and pure woman, loving my neighbors like myself and doing all my Christian duties as I was give to see 'em. When I was tore up from my home by the roots and cast wilted and faded upon Gran'ma Mullins, where the infant memories of Hiram certainly wasn't calculated to do no reviving, I made the best of it. I made the best of Lucy and a dog with a cold nose, too; and I bore up with courage and no complaint under Mrs. Allen and her Persian religion. And I did it all to please you, Mrs. Lathrop, and your fool of a son, Jathrop, whose money, it's my opinion, has acted on him in a most injurious way. He never had much sense, as you yourself know, but now he ain't got no sense a tall."
"I don't—" Mrs. Lathrop started gently to protest.
"Well, I do," rejoined Susan Clegg spiritedly; "and if you don't, you ought to. Anyhow, I mean to tell you, if it's the last act of my life. Anybody as has any sense a tall must have seen that building over was just a mite removed from building new; and what's new never did go with what's old, and it never will. If we was to be built over, we ought to have been all built over or let alone. Jathrop's built the houses over, but he ain't built over the furnishings, and the built-over houses and the not-built-over furniture and carpets and window shades and pots and kettles and pans and china and linen and everything else don't agree and just naturally can't and never can. They're fighting now like sixty, and they'll go on fighting the longer they're kept together. My house was restful and peaceful before, but now it's like a circus with all the wild animals let loose. And I can tell you this, Mrs. Lathrop; my things is getting the worst of it. Why, before they went to storage at Mr. Shores', they was in the best repair you ever see, and now it would make your heart ache to look at 'em. They've aged a century at least during the summer. They're wrinkled and halt and lame and blind, and the new paper on the walls and the new polish on the floors and the new paint on the woodwork is making 'em look sicker and sicker every minute. If there's a society for the prevention of cruelty to furniture and other household goods, it ought to put Jathrop Lathrop in prison. I feel so sorry for those poor tables and chairs and bedsteads and all the rest of 'em as I could cry my eyes out this very minute. There's one walnut, haircloth sofa as Father laid on before he was took to his bed as is pitiful to behold. It looks sicker than Father did even in his last hours, and I wouldn't be surprised any minute to see it just turn over all of itself and give up the ghost. And everything has on such a reproachful look it's more than human nature can bear to face it. If I'd ever thought as being built over would of come to this, I'd of gone on my knees and worked 'em to the bare bones before I'd of put up with it."
Mrs. Lathrop continued to rock in silence.