All the Ladies’ Guild understood that Mrs. Farnham was being posted there to give the alarm when Mrs. Knapp turned into the walk leading to the Parish House, and they went on talking with an agreeable sense of security.
“It’s pretty hard on those Willing’s Emporium people, I say,” Mrs. Prouty remarked, “after years of faithful service, to have everything turned topsy-turvy over their heads by a young whippersnapper. They say he’s going to change the store all around too; put the Ladies’ Cloak Department upstairs where the shoes always were; and he’s taken that top floor that old Mr. Willing rented to the Knights of Pythias and is going to add some new departments. A body won’t know where to find a thing! In my opinion he’ll live to regret it.”
They all reflected silently that if the young Mr. Willing had only been an Episcopalian like his defunct uncle, instead of a Presbyterian, Mrs. Prouty might not have taken the change of the Ladies’ Cloak Department quite so hard.
“Poor Mrs. Knapp feels simply terrible about her husband’s not being promoted,” said Mrs. Merritt, the doctor’s wife. “I saw her yesterday at Wertheimer’s for an instant. Not that she said anything. She wouldn’t, you know, not if she died for it. But you could feel it. All over her. And no wonder!”
“Poor thing!” (Mrs. Prouty had acquired the full, solicitous intonation of the parish visitor.) “She has many burdens to bear. Mr. Prouty often says that in these days it is wonderful to see a woman so devoted to her duty as a home-maker. She simply gives up her whole life to her family! Absolutely!”
“The children are such delicate little things, too, a constant care.” Mrs. Merritt snatched the opportunity to display her inside information. “There’s hardly a week that Doctor isn’t called in there for one or another of them. He often tells me that he doesn’t know what to do for them. They don’t seem to have anything to do with! No digestions, no constitutions. Just like their father. All but little Stephen. He’s strong enough!”
“He’s a perfect imp of darkness!” cried old Mrs. Anderson, lifting her thin gray face from her sewing. “I’ve raised a lot of children in my day and seen a lot more, but I never saw such a naughty contrary child as he is in all my born days. Nor so hateful! He never does anything unless it’s to plague somebody by it. The other day, in the last thaw it was, I’d just got my back porch mopped up after the grocer’s boy—you know how he tracks mud in—and I heard somebody fussing around out there, and I opened the door quick, and there was Stephen Knapp lugging over a great pail of mud to dump it on my porch. He’d dumped one already and got it all spread out on the boards. I said, ‘Why, Stephen Knapp, what makes you do such a bad thing?’ I was really paralyzed to see him at it. ‘What makes you be so bad, Stephen?’ I said. And he said—he’s got the hardest, coolest way of saying those wicked things—he said, as cool as you please, ‘’Tause I hate you, Mis’ Anderson, ’tause I hate you.’ And gave me that black look of his....”
Through the tepid, stagnant air of the room flickered a sulphurous zig-zag of passion. The women shrank back from it, horrified and fascinated.
“Mr. Prouty says,” quoted his wife, “that Stephen Knapp makes him think of the old Bible stories about people possessed of the devil. His mother is at her wit’s end. Mr. Prouty says she has asked him to help her with prayer. And Stephen gets worse all the time. And yet she’s always perfectly firm with him, never spoils him. And it’s wonderful, her iron self-control when he is in one of his tempers. I never could keep my temper like that. It can’t be due to anything about the way she manages him, for she never had a particle of trouble with the other two. Well, it’ll be a great relief to her, as she often says, when he goes to school with the others.”
Mrs. Merritt now said, lowering her voice, “You know she has a chronic skin trouble too that she never says anything about.”