"The longer you keep a man feelin' like he's on a red-hot stove the better he loves you," Mammy Lou told Cousin Eunice to-night, as she was powdering her face for the last time before going down-stairs and trying to keep us from seeing that she was listening for a footstep on the gravel walk. "An' a husban's got to be treated jus' like a lover! A good, heavy poker's a fine thing to make a husban' know 'is place—an' Lawk! a lazy husban's like a greasy churn—you have to give him a thorough scaldin' to do any good!"
This morning at the breakfast table, after father had helped the plates to chicken, saving two gizzards for me, he said: "Times have changed since I was a young man!"
As this wasn't exactly the first time we had heard such a remark none of us paid any attention to it until we saw mother trying to make him hush. Then we knew he must be starting to say something funny about Cousin Eunice and Rufe, for mother always stops him on this subject whenever she can, because she doesn't want Bertha's feelings hurt. But Bertha never seems to mind. She's decided to marry the commercial traveler, I'm almost sure, although her people say he's not "steady." Steady means staying still, so who ever heard of a traveling man who was steady?
"Times have changed, especially about courting," father kept on, pretending that he didn't see mother shaking her head at him. When father gets that twinkle in his eye he can't see anything else. "Now in my young days when a girl and a fellow looked good to each other they usually got engaged at once. But now—jumping Jerusalem! No matter how deeply in love they are they waste days and days trying to get a 'complete understanding' of each other's nature. They talk about their opinion of everything under the sun, from woman's suffrage to Belshazzar's feast."
"Lord Byron wrote a piece in the Fifth Reader about Belshazzar's feast," I started to remark, but I remembered in time to hush, for I've never been able to mention Lord Byron's name to my family in any peace since they found that I keep a vase of flowers in front of his picture all the time. They call him my beau—the beautiful creature!
Father didn't notice my remark, however. He was too busy with his own. "And instead of exchanging locks of hair, as they used to when Mary and I were young, they give each other limp-backed books that have 'helped to shape their career,' and beg that they will mark the passages that impress them!"
"Uncle Dan, you've been eavesdropping!" Cousin Eunice said, looking up from her hot biscuit and honey long enough to smile at him, but she didn't quit eating. It has got out of style to stop eating when you're in love, for a man admires a healthy-looking girl. I know a young man who had been going to see a girl for a long time and never did propose. She was a pretty girl, too, slender and wild-rosy-looking. Well, she took a trip to Germany one summer and drank so much of something fattening over there that the wild-rose look changed to American beauty; and when she came home in the fall the young man was so delighted with her looks that he turned in and married her before Christmas!
Cousin Eunice knows these people too, and she does all she can to keep her digestion good, even to fresh milk and raw eggs. I hope I can get married without the raw eggs part of it. And she tramps all over the woods for the sake of her appetite in stylish-looking tan boots.
As we left the dining-room I noticed that she had on her walking-boots and a short skirt, so I thought Rufe would be along pretty soon for us to go down to the ravine and read poetry. They always take me along because I soon get enough of the poetry and go off to wade in the branch, leaving them on their favorite big gray rock.
Sure enough, Rufe wasn't long about coming, and I saw that his limp-backed book was labeled "Keats" this morning. Cousin Eunice didn't have a book. She carried a parasol. A parasol is used to jab holes in the sand when you're being made love to.