“Oh, I don’t know; maybe a year, maybe a month——”
“Let’s make it a month, Bella,” he said, and put his arm about her. “If we don’t find out in a month that the Sullenders are miserable together, will you admit you’re wrong?”
“No, I won’t! But you’ll probably have to admit that I’m right before that long. I have a sense for these things, Will, and I never go wrong when I trust it. Women know intuitively things that men never suspect. I know I’m right about Mrs. Sullender.”
Her husband permitted the discussion to end with this, wisely fearing that if he sought further to defend his position Bella might plausibly accuse him of “always insisting upon the last word.” And so, for that night, at least, the matter was dropped from their conversation, though not from the thoughts of Mrs. Sperry. Truth to tell, she was what is sometimes called an “obstinate little body,” and, also, she appreciated the advisability of a young wife’s building for future and lifelong use the foundations of infallibility. That is to say, she was young and therefore inexperienced, but she had foresight.
Moreover, she had attentively observed the matrimonial condition of her parents and aunts and uncles. Many and many a time had she heard a middle-aged husband speak to his wife of like years somewhat in this manner: “No, Fannie, you’re wrong again. You’re mistaken about this now, just as you were about James Thompson’s adding machine in 1897. And you were wrong about painting the house, the year after that, too. Don’t you remember how you insisted dark green was the right colour, and finally had to admit, yourself, that dark green was awful, and light yellow would have been just right, as I all along said it would?”
Thus, young Mrs. Sperry, looking to times far ahead, had determined to be wrong about nothing whatever during these early years of her matrimony. Moreover, since argument had arisen concerning the Sullenders, she had made up her mind to be right about them, and to “prove” herself right, “whether she really was or not!” And that is why, on the morning after her arraignment of sweet-women generally, and of her too gracious neighbour particularly, the pretty newcomer in “Highland Place” found herself most pleasurably excited by the naïve but sinister revelations of a stranger eight years of age.
At a little before nine o’clock, Mr. William Sperry had departed (in a young husband’s car) for his place of business, some five miles distant in the smoky heart of the city; and not long afterward the thoughtful Bella, charmingly accoutred as a gardener, came forth with a trowel to uproot weeds that threatened a row of iris she had set out along the gravel path leading from the tiny white veranda to the white picket gate. Thus engaged, she became aware of a small presence fumbling at the latch of this gate, and she changed her position from that of one on all fours, who gropes intently in the earth, to that of one upright from the knees, but momentarily relaxed.
“Do you want to come in?” she inquired, looking out from the shade of her broad hat to where the little figure in blue overalls was marked off into stripes of sunshine and shadow by the intervening pickets of the gate. “Is there something you want here, little boy?”
He succeeded in operating the latch, came in, and looked attentively over her excavations. “Have you found any nice worms?” he asked.
“No, I haven’t found any at all,” she said, somewhat surprised by his adjective. “But I don’t think there are any ‘nice’ worms anywhere. Worms are all pretty horrid.”