"Well sir!" exclaimed Miss Serepta Hightower, forgetting she was speaking to old maids who had a loathing for any expression that suggested a man or the name or the memory of a man, except the man they were prodding and scarifying. "I wouldn't believe it if the news came pine blank from the clouds; that I wouldn't!" and she gave emphasis to the utterance by the malicious and vehement stroking of one skinny fist against the other.
"Why, that man?" she exclaimed with horror, "Why, he would forget his marriage vows before he ever made them. Why when he led Malindy Hartsease a blushing bride to the altar thirty years ago; why, don't you all remember that he sauntered out of the church by his lone lorn self, and the preacher had to go to his house in the dead of night in the rain and tell him that he had left his bride in the church crying her very eyeballs out?"
"The monster! the monster!" all exclaimed and skinny hands and skinny arms and skinny necks were tossing and swaying automatically.
"Of course I warnt there myself (nor I either, came interruptions from all the spinsters) but I heard my mother,poor soul, say that she was right there and that she never felt so sorry for a poor human being in all her life as she did for poor Malindy; but she has gone to her rest now, thank the Lord!" and a dozen handkerchiefs instantly gravitated toward a dozen hysterical faces.
"I pity any poor soul that ties herself to such a man as that from the bottom of my heart," said Miss Anastasia Perkins in great sympathy. "Why she won't know whether she is married or not, neither will he; just as likely as not he will go courting somebody else with his poor wife a sitting back in the chimney corner in the ashes."
"And there is another pint I haint ever said anything about, but I think it ought to be known here betwixt ourselves and not to go any further" said, Miss Martha Gallop "but the way he treated his poor wife Malindy was a purified scandal. Now I aint a telling you this as coming from me, for the good Lord knows when that thing happened,I was a little teensy weensy tot, (with a coquettish toss of her antique head) but old aunt Mehetibel Parsley knows all about it, and I've heard her say over and over again that when Judge Bonham and Malindy would be riding in their carriage to meeting that he would forget where he was going and would fetch up right against the poor house three miles or more in the other direction, and that poor mournful woman would be a sitting back in the carriage with eyes as red as a gander's, and a looking pine plank like she was coming from a funeral."
"Oh the cruel, cruel monster!" came another refrain, and skinny fists would double up and strike against ancient knees like resounding boards, and the spinsters would all heave great, tumultuous sighs, and corkscrew curls, like spiral springs, would dance up and down mechanically upon their well oiled pivots.
Judge Bonham was quite nervously gravitating toward a situation that required great force of character; a situation always extra hazardous and demanding the exercise of every resource.
This phlegmatic man was running the biblical parallel, dreaming dreams and seeing visions; not the distorted creations of the night-mare, but beautiful little crayons of love, swinging like tiny acrobats from blue ribbons on the walls, and descending like vagrant sunbeams upon the vermillion carpet; composite faces, too, with bright golden hair and brighter blue eyes.
The old gentleman sat back in his easy chair, thinking of the captivating beauty over at Ingleside, and there were ecstatic little chimes ringing in his ears, and their chorus always was this,