“When he’s through goin’ to college.”
“That’ll be two or three years, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
“Hum; Alice Price she’ll be gettin’ purty well along by that time.”
“She’s not quite a year older than Joe,” Mrs. Newbolt corrected him, with some asperity, “and she’s one of the kind that’ll keep. Well, I was married myself, and had a baby, when I was nineteen. But that’s no sign.”
“Joe’ll build, I reckon, before then?” guessed Sol.
“No; Alice don’t want him to. She wants to come here a bride, to this house, like I come to it long, long ago. We’ll fix up and make ready for her, little by little, as we go along. It’ll be bringin’ back the pleasure of the old days, it’ll be like livin’ my courtship and marriage over. This was a fine house in the days that Peter brought me here, for Peter, he had money then, and he put the best there was goin’ into it.”
“It looks better than any house around here now, since you fixed it up and painted it,” said Sol.
“It’s better inside than outside,” said she, with a woman’s pride in a home, which justifies her warmth for it. “We had it all plastered and varnished. The doors and casin’s and all the trimmin’s are walnut, worth their weight in gold, now, almost, Judge Maxwell says.”
“Yes, the curly walnut’s all gone, years and years ago,” said Sol.