“What's the matter with her doin' both?” Smead asked.
“Give me the Corporal, and I'll attend to the young fellow,” said Florence.
“Well, if you'll agree to help her in both enterprises,” said Dunbar to Smead, “I'll buy the paper. But you and Havelock must agree to help with the newspaper, and make no important contracts without my consent.”
So I agreed to work for the Corporal, and changed my plan of leaving Griggsby.
Immediately I began to suffer an ill-earned and unwelcome adulation. The Dan'l Websters touched their hats when I passed, and one likened me to Achilles; small boys followed me in the streets and gazed into my face. Fortunately, my alleged crimes were soon forgotten. That is one curious thing about the Yankees: they will use a lie for conversational purposes, but they never believe it. They rarely love a man until they have taken him apart and put him together again by the surgery of conversation. They want to know how he stands it.
CHAPTER VIII
GOOD food, and plenty of it, was required to maintain the talents for leisure, racing, and Websterian grandeur that distinguished the men of Griggsby. As a rule, the women, therefore, were overworked. Men who could not afford the grandeur or the sport indulged in dreams of it, and surrendered their lives to inelegant leisure. Some left their farms and moved into the village to make Dan'l Websters of their sons. Some talked of going West, where the opportunities were better. You could hear men in blue denim dreaming of wealth on the pavements and cracker barrels of Griggsby, while their wives battled with poverty at home.
Wifehood was still a form of bondage, as it was bound to be among a people who for generations had spent every Sabbath and the beginning and the end of every other day with Abraham and his descendants. Their ideals and their duties were from three to four thousand years apart—so far apart that they seldom got acquainted with one another. Among the highest of their ideals was Ruth, of the country of Moab. Did she not touch her face to the ground to find favor with the man she loved? Did she not glean in the fields till even, and thresh out her bundles, and then lie down at the feet of Boaz?