"These!" Mammy Lou said, drawing her hand out from her apron like a man on the stage dressed in velvet does his sword and we saw a string of speckled beans.
"Job's Tears," mammy told the company. "Ther ain't no need to worry about bands when you've got these! Ther nuvver has been a child that cut teeth hard from Adam on down if his ma put a string of these aroun' his neck——"
Cousin Eunice was beginning to say something nice when father spoke up and asked mammy who it was that put them around Adam's neck, which made her mad.
"Poke all the fun you want to," she said, "but the time will come that you-all 'ull be thankful to me for savin' these for Mr. Rufe's baby, or I'm a blue-gum nigger!"
Lots of times I take Waterloo over to make Jean a visit, which is easy on everybody, for the folks over there love babies so that they relieve me of his weight the minute I get there and leave me and Jean free to do whatever we want to. She is teaching me what she calls "artistic handwriting" now, using an actress' signature for a copy. It consists of some very large letters and some very small ones, like the charts in an eye-doctor's office that he uses to see if you're old enough to wear spectacles.
Cousin Eunice has time now with so many folks to help tend to Waterloo to slip off every morning and go to a quiet place down in the yard with her paper and pencil and compose on a book she's trying to write. Before she was ever married she wanted to write a book, and if you once get that idea into your head even marrying won't knock it out.
Cousin Eunice says I'm such a kindred spirit that I don't bother her when I go along too, but she has a dreadful time at her own house trying to write. She don't more than get her soul full of beautiful thoughts about tall, pale men and long-stemmed roses and other things like that before a neighbor drops in and talks for three hours about the lady around the corner's husband staying out so late at night and what her servants use to scrub the kitchen sink. I told her I knew one lady that hated so for folks to drop in that she unscrewed the front doorbell, so she couldn't hear them ring, but she got paid back for it next day by missing the visit of a rich relation.
Rufe and Cousin Eunice may live to be thankful for the string of Job's Tears, but I reckon to-night Miss Merle and Mr. St. John wish that Job never shed a tear in the shape of a bean, for they were what a grown person would call "the indirect cause" of a quarrel between them. It's queer that such a little thing as Waterloo should be picked out by Fate to break up a loving couple, but he did; although I ain't saying that it was altogether his fault.
This afternoon I took him over to Jean's and we were having a lovely time out on their front porch, enjoying stories of her former sweethearts and a bottle of stuffed olives. She told me about one she had last winter that she was deeply attached to. She would see him at a big library in the city where she loves to read every afternoon. She saw him there one time and got to admiring him so much that she would go up there every afternoon at the time she knew he would be there and get a book and sit opposite him, making like she was reading, but really feasting her eyes on his lovely hair and scholarly looking finger-nails.
"I never got acquainted with him, so never learned his name," she told me, jabbing her hat-pin deep down into the olive bottle, like little Jack Horner, "but he was always reading about 'The Origin of the Aryan Family,' so I'm sure he was a young Mr. Aryan."