He was right. Mrs. Gooch had come over to remonstrate with her niece upon her relations to her husband.
"I couldn't rest, Bathalina," she said, "after hearing that that unfacalized critter was round here again, for I knew just what a fool you be. And it ain't no way respectable to have an intermittent husband, always comin' an' goin,' like the old woman's soap. 'Tain't what our folks has been used to. He's got all your money, hain't he? I'm sure I don't see what more he wants. You let him have every copper you had in the bank, I'll be bound."
"Well," retorted Mrs. Mixon, "what if I did? I put that money by for a rainy day, didn't I? an' when it come, I spent it."
"Lawful sakes! I hope you didn't put it by for Peter Mixin's rainy days! As I told your cousin Huldy, he's one of them folks that makes a dreadful cheerful funeral."
"Dear me!" exclaimed Bathalina, in her confusion wetting her finger, and putting it to the water in the boiler to see if it were hot enough to sizzle, like a hot iron. "How confusin' you are, aunt Jeff! 'Restless mortals toil for nought,' as the hymn says; and you're one of 'em."
"I should think I was!" retorted aunty Jeff. "But I tell you ours is a respectable family, and such culch as Peter Mixup was never brought into it before; to say nothing of having a husband bobbing after you like the tail of a kite, now here and now there!"
"Gracious!" exclaimed her niece fiercely. "How you go on! Don't get me mad, or my sinful pride'll be too much for me."
"Sinful fiddlesticks! If you had any pride, you wouldn't have that rag-tag-and-bobtail, Tom-Dick-and-Harry sort of a husband round you!"
"I shall go mad!" cried Bathalina, with an awful shrillness in her tones. "You'll make me go a raving lunacy!"
"You are one now!" screamed her aunt. "You always was."