"Don't wish such stuff," said Catherine. "Nobody ain't never the same after they've seen her."
"Was Uncle different?" Roger had come back into the kitchen and was looking curiously at his aunt.
"Diff'rent? He was another man. He didn't even look the same. Sich eyes! Al'ays looking past ye at something behind ye. They'd give anyone creeps. He never had any notion of flesh-and-blood women after that—said a man wouldn't, after seeing Isabel. His life was plumb ruined. Lucky he died young. I hated to be in the same room with him—he wa'n't canny, that was all there was to it. You keep away from that grave—you don't want to look odder than ye are by nature. And when ye git married, ye'll have to give up roamin' about half the night in graveyards. A wife wouldn't put up with it, as I've done."
"I'll never get as good a wife as you, Aunt Catherine," said Roger with a little whimsical smile that gave him the look of an amused gnome.
"Dessay you won't. But someone ye have to have. Why'n't ye try 'Liza Adams. She might have ye—she's gittin' on."
"'Liza ... Adams!"
"That's what I said. Ye needn't repeat it—'Liza ... Adams—'s if I'd mentioned a hippopotamus. I git out of patience with ye. I b'lieve in my heart ye think ye ought to git a wife that'd look like a picter."
"I do, Aunt Catherine. That's just the kind of wife I want—grace and beauty and charm. Nothing less than that will ever content me."
Roger laughed bitterly again and went out. It was sunset. There was no work to do that night except to milk the cows, and his little home boy could do that. He felt a glad freedom. He put his hand in his pocket to see if his beloved Wordsworth was there and then he took his way across the fields, under a sky of purple and amber, walking quickly despite his limp. He wanted to get to some solitary place where he could forget Aunt Catherine and her abominable suggestions and escape into the world of dreams where he habitually lived and where he found the loveliness he had not found nor could hope to find in his real world.