“Oh, pooh! You only feel hypoey, Mary Jane says. Try an’ not think ’bout troubles so much, please. An’ I do think, like she does, ’at it’s the queerest thing your hypoey comes whenever they’s such a lot to do, isn’t it? I know you can’t help it, an’ it must make you feel dreadful bad not to be able to help more; but do try an’ not mind it, there’s a dear!”
“I’ll try; but I ain’t the man I uset ter was. I’ve got the neuraligy in my head, an’ the dyspepsy in my stummick, an’ the lumbago in my back, an’ I ain’t a good deal well. You know it, don’t ye, Steenie? Ye’re sorry fer the old man, ain’t ye?”
“Why, ye-es. But I’m lots sorrier for all the rest of the folks. My father says it’s a’most more than Grandmother can bear, this leaving her old home; but she doesn’t go ‘Oh!’ and ‘Ah-h!’ over it. She just shuts her lips tight, an’ goes hard to work; an’ I guess that’s what you’d better do, dear Mr. Tubbs. It seems to help her, an’ maybe it will you. Why, she’s packed every one o’ her ‘precious books,’ all her own self, without nobody touching to help her; an’ Mary Jane says it’s the best thing she could have done.”
“Some folks hain’t no fine feelin’s, Steenie. Mary Jane hain’t,—I grieve ter say it.”
“What makes you, then?”
“Because—be-cause, I tell ye! Here they ain’t nobody payin’ no ’tention ter me; ner thinkin’ o’ my—’motions, a tearin’ myself up by the ruts, this ’ere way; an’ jest a goin’ on as if this break-up wasn’t nothin’.”
“Well. ’Xcuse me, but I don’t see as it is to—you. ’Cause it wasn’t your house, see? An’ the little new one is cuter than cute! It’s as cunning as a doll-house. An’ Mary Jane says, ‘Make the best on ’t, honey, an’ thank the Lord it’s in a decent neighborhood!’ An’ I’m going to do it. Mary Jane Tubbs is a real Christian, my father says.”
“Yer ‘father says’—‘father says’—tacked onter the end o’ every verse! Yer father don’t know ever’thing!”
“He does, too, Resolved Tubbs!—Mister, I mean. Everybody says ’at he’s the best man in the world! He can’t see a single thing, yet he’s going to work an’ try an’ write down, all in the dark, all ’at he knows ’bout managing a great rancho; an’ Judge Courtenay says ’at he’ll get it copied out ‘fair an’ square,’ an’ then printed; an’ the world’ll have to see that it takes ‘more ’n blindness to kill a brave man,’—so there! And he doesn’t groan, either. Since he’s thought ’bout this book business he’s just as jolly as he used to be, an’ never lets Grandmother nor me nor anybody see if he feels bad—not once! S’posin’ he got the hypo, too! Wouldn’t Grandmother an’ Mary Jane an’ me have a terr’ble time, then?”
“Hm-m. I don’t see where Mary Jane’s sech a great Christian! My-soul-I-declare! I hain’t seen her tetch her Bible once sence we begun ter tear up.”