“Bless you!” exclaimed the farmer, “you are rather proud of your old husband, aren’t you? But Phil will soon see, with half an eye, that it would be the silliest thing in the world for him to fall in love with a girl like that.”
“I can’t for the life of me see why,” said the mother. “He’s just as good as she, and a good deal smarter, or I’m no judge.”
“See here, Lou Ann,” said the farmer, with more than a hint of impatience in his voice, “you know ’twon’t do either of ’em any good to fall in love if they can’t marry each other. An’ what would Phil have to support his wife on? Would she come out here an’ ’tend to all the house-work of the farm, like you do, just for the sake of havin’ Phil for a husband? Not unless she’s a fool, even if Phil is our boy an’ about as good as they make ’em. An’ you know well enough that he couldn’t afford to live in New York: he’s got nothin’ to do it on.”
“Not now, but he might go in business there, and make enough to live in style. Other young fellows have done it!”
“Yes,—in stories,” said the old man. “Lou Ann, don’t you kind o’ think that for a church-member of thirty years’ standin’ you’re gettin’ mighty worldly-minded?”
“No, I don’t,” Mrs. Hayn answered. “If not to want my boy to drudge away his life like his father’s done is bein’ worldly, then I’m goin’ to be a backslider, an’ stay one. I don’t think ’twould be a bit bad to have a married son down to York, so’s his old mother could have some place to go once in a while when she’s tired to death of work an’ worry.”
“Oho!” said the old man: “that’s the point of it, eh? Well, I don’t mind backslidin’ enough myself to say the boy may marry one of Satan’s daughters, if it’ll make life any easier for you, old lady.”
“Much obliged,” the mother replied, “but I don’t know as I care to do visitin’ down there.”
The conversation soon subsided, husband and wife dropping into revery from which they dropped into slumber. In one way or other, however, the subject came up again. Said Mrs. Hayn one day, just as her husband was leaving the dinner-table for the field in which he was cutting and stacking corn,—
“I do believe Phil’s best coat is finer stuff than anything Mr. Tramlay wore when they were up here. I don’t believe what he wore Sundays could hold a candle to Phil’s.”