The old man looked at his wife for a moment, and there was a mighty struggle in his mind. Finally he hunted for their community ear trumpet, and marched across the room to her side. At great cost of pride he put the tube of the trumpet to her ear and shouted:
“I’d like to make it happy days, Mary; and I kinda think I was part wrong. Anyway, here I be speaking first.”
Aunt Mary took her turn at the trumpet.
“Reuben, I’m awful glad you spoke first. Thinking it over, I guess I was a little to blame, too, but not half as much as you were!”
And Reuben saw visions of his old courting days, when they could both hear whispered confidences, when this gray and wrinkled woman was a blooming girl. And the old man rose to heights of wild extravagance.
“Here, boy,” he said, “I’ll give you ten cents to go out to the shed and split an armful of that soft pine.”
And after the door closed behind him—well, there is a human language which needs no words for its interpretation; it is action.
It is no wonder that when the boy returned Aunt Mary was so flustered that instead of filling the pail with the skim-milk, she poured in fine cream! That baby had a full supply of vitamines for once.
I am acquainted with a young man who once went out into a country neighborhood to canvass for a subscription book. This man was somewhat deaf, just enough to make him mix words a little. Of course, he had no business to serve as a book agent, but the deaf will sometimes attempt strange things. He stopped at one farmhouse and found a middle-aged man and woman in the sitting-room. The man was evidently annoyed and embarrassed by the book agent’s entrance, but the latter paid little attention. He ran glibly through his story twice, and finished as usual, handing his pencil over with his usual persuasive:
“Sign right here, on this dotted line.”