"I have come to tell you that I am to be married to John Roger Churchill Knight. I have told no one but you and Grandma. I have promised to marry him in June, so I haven't much time to get ready. I'm hoping, Fanny, that you will come and help out."
At that, of a sudden all the old-time zest for living, the joy of seeing, hearing and doing, surged to Fanny's very throat and force of habit brought the words.
"Oh, land alive, Nanny," fairly gurgled the old Fanny, "such a time as we've had in Green Valley! It was that awful cold spell after Christmas that began it. Old man Pelley died—of complications—and everybody thought Mrs. Dudley would sing hymns of praise in public, they'd fought so about their chickens. But I declare if she didn't cry about the hardest at the funeral and even blamed herself for aggravating him.
"Of course him dying left old Mrs. Pelley alone in a big house, and her being pretty feeble, she felt that Harry and Ivy ought to come and live with her. Well,—Ivy went—but she vowed that there were two things she would do, mother-in-law or no mother-in-law. She said she'd put as many onions in her hamburger steak and Irish stew as she pleased—you know Mrs. Pelley can't stand onions—and she'd have a fire in the fireplace as often as the fancy struck her. Everybody thought there'd be an awful state of things—but land—now that Mrs. Pelley has got used to the open fire you can't drive her away from it with a stick and she don't seem to bother her head about Ivy's cooking and last week she actually ate three helpings of hamburger steak that Ivy said was just reeking with onions.
"A body's never too old to learn, I suppose. There's Henry Rawlins suddenly took the notion to quit smoking. Ettie'd been at him for twenty-five years with twenty good reasons to quit, but no. And all of a sudden—when Ettie's give up hope and not mentioned it for a couple of months—he up and quits and won't even tell why. Ettie's worried—says he's eating himself out of house and home and wants to sleep about twenty-four hours a day.
"Talking about houses makes me think that the Stockton girls are having their house painted by a man with a wooden leg. Billy Evans picked him up somewhere and Seth Curtis was telling me how he came to lose that leg. Seems like he was prospecting somewheres in Montana, got drunk, froze it, gangrene set in and they had to amputate. They say he's a mighty smart man too. Maybe John'll get him to paint our house when he's through at the Stocktons.
"Talk about physical deformities! Eva Collins has got it into her head that she's too fat entirely and she's been dieting and rolling and taking all sorts of exercises religiously. Seems she got so set on being thin that she practices these exercises whenever she happens to think of it and wherever she happens to be. She happened to be right under the lights three or four times and so she smashed them, globes and all. Bill says she'd better reduce in the barn or else let him charge admission for a rolling performance to pay for the broken lights.
"So there's Eva trying to thin off and they say Mert Hagley's swollen all out of shape, having been stung almost to death by his own bees. Of course, nobody's sympathizing overmuch with Mert. He was so afraid of losing a swarm of bees that he forgot to be cautious and there he is laid out. But it isn't the bee stings that hurt him so much. Mary's been willed a good farm and a big lump of cash by some aunt that died a month ago and hated Mert like poison. And the thing's just gone to Mary's head.
"She's gone into the city on regular spending sprees and Mert's wild. He can't touch the farm and he's afraid Mary'll have that lump of money all spent before he gets out of bed. Everybody's hoping she will and advising her to buy every blessed thing she ever had a hankering for and things she never even heard of. Mrs. Brownlee, the president of the Civic League, even told her to buy a dish-washing machine, and heavens, if Mary didn't go right down and buy it. Doc Philipps advised her to buy herself the very best springs and mattress on the market—that it would help her back to sleep decently of nights. She's having hot-water heat put in and is going to do her washing with an electric washer. Seth Curtis put her up to that. And as soon as Mert gets better she's going visiting her sister in Colorado. She says she'll likely die of homesickness but that she's just got to go off somewhere to get used to and learn to wear properly all the new clothes she's got.
"Well, Mary's buying all these labor-saving machines got the whole town to thinking and spending. Dick's put in a new cash register they say is nice enough to have in the parlor. It made Jessie Williams buy a lot of new silver that she didn't need no more than a cat needs a match-box. But she got it and she gave a luncheon the other day to some of the South End crowd and tried to get just about all that silver on the table, I guess. Of course, it looked mighty nice but when the women came to eat they didn't know what to do with it. They got pretty miserable, all sticking to just the one knife and fork and spoon. And Jessie got so rattled that she just about forgot to use the stuff too. And finally old Mrs. Vingie, that Jessie asked just to have the news spread, got up mad as a hornet and marched out, saying she was too old to be insulted.