"Truly you were right, when you said women are not idealized in primitive conditions of society," I said, after the first mirthful impulse created by so comical a recital had passed. "But how was it, that with so much to disgust you with the very name of marriage, you finally did consent to take a husband? He, certainly, was not one of the kind that came riding up to doors, proposing on the instant?"
"No, he was not: but he might as well have been for any difference it made to me," said Mrs. Greyfield, with that bitterness in her tone that always came into it when she spoke of Seabrook. "You ask 'how was it that I at last consented to take a husband?' Do you not know that such influences as constantly surrounded me, are demoralizing as I said? You hear a thing talked of until you become accustomed to it. It is as Pope says: You 'first endure, then pity, then embrace.' I endured, felt contempt, and finally yielded to the pressure.
"Why, you have no idea, from what I have told you, of the reality. My house as I have already mentioned, was one room in a tenement. It opened directly upon the street. In one corner was a bed. Opposite the door was a stove for cooking and warming the house. A table and two chairs besides my little sewing-chair completed the furnishing of the apartment. The floor was bare, except where I had put down an old coverlet for a rug before the bed. Here in this crowded place I cooked, ate, slept, worked, and received company and offers!
"Just as an example of the way in which some of my suitors broached the subject I will describe a scene. Fancy me kneeling on the floor, stanching the blood from quite a serious cut on Benton's hand. The door opens behind me, and a man I never have seen before, thrusts his head and half his body in at the opening. His salutation is 'Howdy!'—his first remark, 'I heern thar was a mighty purty widder livin' here; and I reckon my infurmation was correct. If you would like to marry, I'm agreeable.'"
"How did you receive this candidate? You have not told me what you replied on these occasions," I said, amused at this picture of pioneer life.
"I turned my head around far enough to get one look at his face, and asking him rather crossly 'if there were any more fools where he came from,' went on bandaging Benton's hand."
The recollection of this absurd incident caused the narrator to laugh as she had not often laughed in my hearing.
"This may have been a second Werther," I remarked, "and surely no Charlotte could have been more unfeeling than you showed yourself. It could not be that a man coming in that way expected to get any other answer than the one you gave him?"
"I do not know, and I did not then care. One day a man, to whose motherless children I had been kind when opportunity offered, slouched into my room without the ceremony of knocking and dropping into a chair as if his knees failed him, began twirling his battered old hat in an embarrassed manner, and doing as so many of his predecessors had done—proposing off-hand. He had a face like a terra-cotta image, a long lank figure, faded old clothes, and a whining voice."
"He told me that he had no 'woman,' and that I had no 'man,' a condition that he evidently considered deplorable. He assured me that I suited him 'fustrate;' that his children 'sot gret store by me,' and 'liked my victuals;' and that he thought a 'heap' of my little boy. He also impressed upon me that he had been 'considerin' the 'rangement of jinin' firms for some time. To close the business at once, he proposed that I should accept of him for my husband then and there."