“I don’t care anything particular about old rooms,” said Miss Saxon. “I’m beholden to you, Elsie; but I’d rather be in my own house, long ’s I can have somebody with me.”
“I s’pose you’ve got Solomon Ridgeway there yet,” observed her brother, maliciously. “You don’t seem to count much on him, but mebbe you’re afraid of robbers, with all his jewellery in the house.”
She took no notice of the sarcasm. “Solomon’s been gone ’most a week,” she said. “Took a notion he wanted to be back at the farm again.”
“So he’s gone back to the poor’us, has he?” said the old gentleman. “Well, it’s the place for him, poor afflicted cretur!”
She threw up her head with the quick impatient motion. “Dreadful ’flicted, Ruel,” she said. “He’s a leetle the happiest man I know.”
“Hm,” grunted her brother; “happy because he hain’t got sense enough to know his own situation. He thinks he’s rich, when all he’s got wouldn’t buy him a week’s victuals and a suit o’ clothes.”
Miss Saxon’s eyes narrowed to the hawk-like expression which was common in her controversies with her brother. “Oh, he’s crazy, of course,” she said, with an inexpressible dryness in her voice; “thinks he’s rich when he’s poor! But you didn’t call Squire Ethan crazy when he had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it, and was so ’fraid he’d come to want that he dassn’t give a cent of it away, or let his own folks have enough to live on.”
“I ain’t excusing Squire Ethan,” said the deacon, bridling. “He made a god of his money, and he’ll be held responsible for it. But Solomon Ridgeway ain’t half witted. He’s been crack-brained for the last forty years, and you know it.”
The coolness of her manner increased with his rising heat. “Oh, Solomon’s daft, Ruel,” she said in her politest manner. “We won’t argy about that. A man must be daft that takes his wife’s death so hard it eeny most kills him, and he stays single all the rest of his life. A man that had full sense would be courting some other woman inside a year.”
The deacon’s eyes kindled. “You talk like one of the foolish women, Katharine,” he said sharply. “A man ain’t compelled to stay single all the rest of his days because the Lord’s seen fit to take away his wife. The Bible says it ain’t good for man to be alone, and ‘whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing.’”