"Phil, dear, don't be so dreadfully previous. The bargain is that the firm shall send us, without charge, a specimen instrument, which I've promised to display to the best advantage, and I've also promised to give elementary instruction to every one who manifests interest in it."
"Grace Somerton! The house will be full from morning till night. Country people will throng about such an instrument like children about a hand-organ. 'Twill be the end of your coming into the store to talk to the drummers, or even to see me."
"Oh, Phil! Where are your wits? I'm going to have the organ kept at the church, and let the most promising would-be learners and possible buyers do their practising there. The organ firm sells on instalments; we'll guarantee the instalments, for I'll select the buyers—who will want only smaller instruments—from among women who bring us chickens and butter and eggs and feathers and such things. So the church will be sure of an instrument more appropriate to congregational singing than a piano, and our piano won't be coveted, and we will make a little money, and by the time the next revival season arrives there will be at least a few people who can play, and perhaps some who are accustomed to closed windows and stuffy air, and won't get splitting headaches and lose five pounds of weight in a week, as I did."
"Allow me to catch my breath!" said Philip. "Give me some tea, please, quick!—no milk or sugar. I hope 'tis very strong. You've planned all this, yet there you sit, as natural and unassuming as if you'd never thought of anything but keeping house and being the sweetest wife in the world!"
"Thank you, but shouldn't sweetness have any strength and character? And what is business for, I should like to know, but to enable women to keep house—and keep their pianos, if they have any?"
"Caleb," said Philip, on returning to the store, "I want to apologize for answering you rudely this morning about that enraging piano. I was in a hard study over—"
"Don't mention it," said Caleb, with a beatific smile. "Besides, 'Providence tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' as the Bible says in hundreds of different ways. I s'pose your wife's told you what she's done about music for the church? Je—ru—salem! Ain't she a peeler, though?"
"She is indeed—if I may assume that a 'peeler' is an incomparable combination of goodness and good sense."
"That's about the meanin' of it, in my dictionary." Then Caleb fixed his eyes inquiringly upon Philip's face and kept them there so long that Philip asked:—
"What now, Caleb?"