“Oh, only a little kind of awakenin’, I s’pose,” said the old man. “I can’t keep my mind off of what’s goin’ on right under my eyes, an’ it’s so unlike what anybody would have expected that I can’t help goin’ behind the returns, as they used to say in politics. An’ when I do that there’s only one way of seein’ ’em, an’ I’m glad I’ve got the eyes to see ’em in that light.”
“So am I,” said Mrs. Hayn, gently but successfully putting a floury impression of four fingers and a thumb on her husband’s head. “I s’pose it’s ’cause I’m so tired of waitin’ that I don’t look at things just as you do. ’Pears to me there’s nothin’ that comes up, an’ that our hearts get set on, but what we’ve got to wait for. It gets to be awful tiresome, after you’ve been at it thirty or forty years. I think Phil might hurry up matters a little.”
“Mebbe ’tisn’t Phil’s fault,” suggested the farmer.
“Well,” said Mrs. Hayn, with a flash behind her glasses, “I don’t see why any gal should keep that boy a-waitin’, if that’s what you mean.”
“Don’t, eh?” drawled the old man, with a queer smile and a quizzical look. “Well, I s’pose he is a good deal more takin’ than his father was.”
“No such thing,” said the old lady.
“Much obliged: I’m a good deal too polite to contradict,—when you’re so much in earnest, you know,” the old man replied. “But if it’s so, what’s the reason that you kept him waitin’?”
“Why, I—it was—you see, I—’twas—the way of it was—sho!” And Mrs. Hayn suddenly noticed that a potted geranium in the kitchen window needed a dead leaf removed from its base.
“Yes,” said her husband, following her with his eyes. “An’ I suppose that’s just about what Phil’s gal would say, if any one was to ask her. But the longer you waited the surer I was of you, wasn’t I?”
“Oh, don’t ask questions when you know the answer as well as I do,” said the old lady. “I want to see things come to a head; that’s all.”