Amos chuckled. “Always was, Agnes. Just the same when I was your age. But she can make mighty un-cranky biscuits.”
“She gets cross as a bear if I don’t help her with the dishes.”
Amos looked at his daughter with a dry smile. “Then if I was you, Agnes, I’d help her.”
She started to reply, but thought better of it. A little restraint fell upon them, and this continued until Amos leaned back with a sigh of contentment and pulled a pipe from his coat pocket. It was a horny old pipe, black, odorous, rank as a skunk cabbage. Agnes hated it; but Amos stuck to it, year in, year out. When it caked so full that a pencil would not go down into its cavity, Amos always whittled out the cake, burned the pipe with alcohol, and started over again. The brier had been in regular and constant use for half a dozen years—and it was still, as Agnes used to say, “going strong.”
Amos cuddled this pipe lovingly in the palm of his hand. He polished the black bowl in his palm, and then by rubbing it across his cheek and against the side of his nose. Agnes fidgeted, and Amos watched her with a twinkle in his eye until she rose suddenly and cried:
“Dad—that’s horrid!”
He chuckled. “What was it you said about dishes?” he asked.
She went sulkily toward the kitchen.
Amos watched her with a certain amount of speculation in his eyes. Amos was always speculating, speculating about people, and about things. He stared at the door that closed behind her for a long minute before the clock on the mantel struck seven and broke the charm. Then he got up stiffly, favoring his big body, and went into the sitting room. Only half a dozen houses in Hardiston had living rooms in those days. Rooms with no other appointed use were, respectively, sitting rooms and parlors. The library and the living room were arriving together.
Amos went into the sitting room and pulled a creaky rockingchair up before the coal fire. His feet were in carpet slippers, and he kicked off the slippers and thrust his feet toward the blaze. He wore knitted wool socks, gray, with white heels and toes. Maria Hale had knitted Amos’ socks for ten years. He wriggled his toes comfortably, then searched from one pocket a black plug of tobacco, from another a crooked-blade pruning knife. He sliced three or four slices from the plug with grave care, restored plug and knife to his pockets, rolled the slices to a crumbling pile in his palm, and filled his pipe. When it was lighted—he “primed” it by cramming into the top of the pipe some half-burned tobacco from a previous smoking—he leaned back luxuriously in the chair, closed his eyes, puffed hard and thought gently.