“Yes, I am, too. She kep’ naggin’ at me day an’ night fer fear yuh’d be sassy to her an’ she’d have to take a back seat.”
“I’ll tell you what’s the matter with her!” interrupted Emarine. “She’s got the big-head. She thinks ev’ry body wants to rush into her old house, an’ marry her son, an’ use her old things! She wants to make ev’rybody toe her mark.”
“Emarine! She’s my mother.”
“I don’t care if she is. I w’u’dn’t tech her with a ten-foot pole.”
“She’ll be all right after we’re married, Emarine, an’ she finds out how—how nice yuh are.”
His own words appealed to his sense of the ridiculous. He smiled. Emarine divined the cause of his reluctant amusement and was instantly furious. Her face turned very white. Her eyes burned out of it like two fires.
“You think I ain’t actin’ very nice now, don’t you? I don’t care what you think, Orville Parmer, good or bad.”
The young man stood thinking seriously.
“Emarine,” he said, at last, very quietly, “I love yuh an’ yuh know it. An’ yuh love me. I’ll alwus be good to yuh an’ see that choo ain’t emposed upon, Emarine. An’ I think the world an’ all of yuh. That’s all I got to say. I can’t see what ails yuh, Emarine.... When I think o’ that day when I asked yuh to marry me.... An’ that night I give yuh the ring”—the girl’s eyelids quivered suddenly and fell. “An’ that moonlight walk we took along by the falls.... Why, it seems as if this can’t be the same girl.”
There was such a long silence that Mrs. Endey, cramping her back with one ear pressed to the keyhole of the door, decided that he had won and smiled dryly.