CHAPTER IV.
“I have stirred up a hornet’s nest, mother.”
“Ruth! Where?”
“Only a mental one, dear. Thee must not take me too literally. But I unwisely asked Lydia’s children to help me in trying to improve Melville, and they responded only too briskly.”
Then the daughter related what she had overheard in the south room.
“And Fritz was the only one in the right of it,” was Grandmother Kinsolving’s brief comment.
“How can one love what is not lovable? I have been trying three years, and thee knows I have not succeeded over well,” answered Ruth, soberly.
“I think thee has tried less to love than to make, daughter. Just thee leave off the making part, and follow Fritz Pickel’s good advice. Then thee will be the example to the children that thee should be.”
“There is another way out of it, mother dear. Margaret Capers and Melville are always threatening to ‘leave,’ when things do not move just to their notion. Now we have a good reason for letting them keep their word. The peace which would follow their going would be balm to my soul, and marrow to your bones, Mother Amy.”
The old lady did not notice the remark, but went on putting away her gray silken gown as carefully as if it were not to be taken out and worn again on the morrow. Then she folded her snowy kerchief and placed it in its own appropriate drawer of the old-fashioned chiffonier, smoothing out every wrinkle with a lingering daintiness of touch that seemed a sort of ceremony to the less careful Ruth, who enjoyed nothing better than to watch her mother dressing and undressing.