"Well, it isn't any business of mine," John Abner said, after deliberation. "If you choose to bring him here, of course you have the right. But I hope you aren't going to wear yourself out waiting on him. You've got no moderation in such things. After Snowbird's sickness last winter, you didn't look like yourself."
She shook her head. "I'd do much more for Snowbird. But I shan't wait on him. I'll get Fluvanna's sister, Mirandy. She's an old woman, and a good hand with sick people, even if she hasn't any sense in the dairy." As she finished, she heard a voice in her mind asking distinctly, "Why am I doing this? Why should I take the trouble?" And there wasn't any answer. Even when she dragged her mind for an excuse or even an idea, she could not unearth one. She had stopped loving Jason thirty years ago; she had stopped hating him at an indefinite period; she had stopped even remembering that he was alive; yet she could not, without doing violence to her own nature, let him die in the poorhouse. After all, it was not her feeling or lack of feeling for him, it was the poorhouse and her horror of the poorhouse that decided his fate.
"I'll have to go with you," John Abner was saying. "You can't manage it by yourself."
"No. I'd rather have you. If we start right after dinner, that ought to bring us back before the milking is over. The road is rough, I'm afraid. We'll have to take some pillows in the back of the car."
"If he's bad off, perhaps Doctor Stout won't let him come," John Abner suggested hopefully.
"Well, we'll stop at the doctor's house on the way. That's why I want to start early."
That night, after the last of the day's work was over, they sat in front of Dorinda's fire and talked as they used to talk when John Abner was a boy and had not been warped by disappointment. Their thoughts were in the future, not in the past, and Dorinda's visions were coloured by the optimism which she had won more from perseverance than from any convincing lesson of experience. Because of the very defects of his qualities, John Abner suited her. It was true that his companionship had its imperfections; but she would not have exchanged his sullen reticence for the golden fluency of the new minister at Pedlar's Mill. Her stepson's personality was attractive to her, for he gave an impression of inexhaustible strength in reserve; and in the matter of disposition he influenced her less as an example than as a warning, which, after all, she reflected, was the kind of influence she needed.
"When all is said, we are as contented as we could expect to be," she remarked, when he rose to go upstairs. "If you don't marry, we'll have a pleasant old age by the fireside."
He laughed shortly, for he was in one of his gentler moods. There was a charm, she thought, in his long thin features, his sallow skin with bluish shadows about the mouth, his squinting eyes, and his straight black hair which fell in stringy locks over his forehead.
"You may marry again yourself," he said abruptly. "You aren't as handsome as you used to be, but you're still better-looking than anybody about here."