“You say that,” said Jennie, “because you’re a lover of the Morgan horse.”
“Napoleon Bonaparte was a Brown Mouse,” said the colonel. “So was George Washington, and so was Peter the Great. Whenever a Brown Mouse appears he changes things in a little way or a big way.”
“For the better, always?” asked Jennie.
“No,” said the colonel. “The Brown Mouse may throw back to slant-headed savagery. But Jim ... sometimes I think Jim is the kind of Mendelian segregation out of which we get Franklins and Edisons and their sort. You may get some good ideas out of Jim. Let us have them here for Christmas, by all means.”
In due time Jennie’s invitation reached Jim and his mother, like an explosive shell fired from a distance into their humble dwelling—quite upsetting things. Twenty-five years constitute rather a long wait for social recognition, and Mrs. Irwin had long since regarded herself as quite outside society. To be sure, for something like half of this period, she had been of society if not in it. She had done the family washings, scrubbings and cleanings, had made the family clothes and been a woman of all work, passing from household to household, in an orbit determined by the exigencies of threshing, harvesting, illness and child-bearing. At such times she sat at the family table and participated in the neighborhood gossip, in quite the manner of a visiting aunt or other female relative; but in spite of the democracy of rural life, there is and always has been a social difference between a hired woman and an invited guest. And when Jim, having absorbed everything which the Woodruff school could give him in the way of education, found his first job at “making a hand,” Mrs. Irwin, at her son’s urgent request, ceased going out to work for a while, until she could get back her strength. This she had never succeeded in doing, and for a dozen years or more had never entered a single one of the houses in which she had formerly served.
“I can’t go, James,” said she; “I can’t possibly go.”
“Oh, yes, you can! Why not?” said Jim. “Why not?”
“You know I don’t go anywhere,” urged Mrs. Irwin.
“That’s no reason,” said her son.
“I haven’t a thing to wear,” said Mrs. Irwin.