“It's about ez good a place for a little talk, Miss Budd,” he said, pointing to a tree root, “ez ef we went a spell further, and it's handy to the house. And ef you'll jest say what you'd like outer the cupboard or the bar—no matter which—I'll fetch it to you.”
But Mary Ellen Budd seated herself sideways on the root, with her furled white parasol in her lap, her skirts fastidiously tucked about her feet, and glancing at the fatuous Abner from under her stack of fluffy hair and light eyelashes, simply shook her head and said that “she reckoned she wasn't hankering much for anything” that morning.
“I've been calkilatin' to myself, Miss Budd,” said Abner resignedly, “that when two folks—like ez you and me—meet together to kinder discuss things that might go so far ez to keep them together, if they hez had anything of that sort in their lives afore, they ought to speak of it confidentially like together.”
“Ef any one o' them sneakin', soulless critters in the kitchen hez bin slingin' lies to ye about me—or carryin' tales,” broke in Mary Ellen Budd, setting every one of her thirty-two strong, white teeth together with a snap, “well—ye might hev told me so to oncet without spilin' my Sunday! But ez fer yer keepin' me a minit longer, ye've only got to pay me my salary to-day and”—but here she stopped, for the astonishment in Abner's face was too plain to be misunderstood.
“Nobody's been slinging any lies about ye, Miss Budd,” he said slowly, recovering himself resignedly from this last back-handed stroke of fate; “I warn't talkin' o' you, but myself. I was only allowin' to say that I was a di-vorced man.”
As a sudden flush came over Mary Ellen's brownish-white face while she stared at him, Abner hastened to delicately explain. “It wasn't no onfaithfulness, Miss Budd—no philanderin' o' mine, but only 'incompatibility o' temper.'”
“Temper—your temper!” gasped Mary Ellen.
“Yes,” said Abner.
And here a sudden change came over Mary Ellen's face, and she burst into a shriek of laughter. She laughed with her hands slapping the sides of her skirt, she laughed with her hands clasping her narrow, hollow waist, laughed with her head down on her knees and her fluffy hair tumbling over it. Abner was relieved, and yet it seemed strange to him that this revelation of his temper should provoke such manifest incredulity in both Byers and Mary Ellen. But perhaps these things would be made plain to him hereafter; at present they must be accepted “in the day's work” and tolerated.
“Your temper,” gurgled Mary Ellen. “Saints alive! What kind o' temper?”