“It’s just two boys,” Poppy spoke up quickly, noticing that the older one was trying to look over our shoulders. “We haven’t had any supper. And seeing your light, as we were hoofing it for New Zion, we wondered if you wouldn’t be kind enough to sell us something to eat.”
“Laws-a-me!” cried the little old woman, with a nervous, excited gesture. “If you’ve got money, keep it. You don’t have to pay for a meal in this house, not while I’m here, though how long I’ll be here I can’t say.”
“That’s fine,” says Poppy in good manners. “But we don’t want to be cheap about it.”
“Samantha Ann Danver Doane is my name,” the woman ran on, “Danver being my maiden name, and a name I’m justly proud of, I want you to know. While it probably isn’t anything to boast of, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of, I’ll confess to you, as I have to other people, it being my nature to be frank and open, that I’m only a poor relation of the man who built this house and lived in it until his sudden death, the ninth of last August. So now you know who I am, and you understand what I mean when I say I don’t know how long I’ll be here.... Who did you say you were?”
Poppy gave our names and explained about the closed highway. All the time he was talking the woman talked, too. It was kind of funny. But I kept a straight face. For even if old people are queer, you can’t laugh at them to their face. I guess not. Mother and Dad would jerk me out of my skin if I ever did a trick like that.
“When you first knocked,” the woman ran on, and I was getting wise to her lively eyes now, “I thought it was Miss Ruth. ‘There,’ says I to myself, as I dropped my work in the kitchen, ‘it would be just like that dear jolly girl to call me to the door and then jump into my arms.’ While I am a poor relation of the Danvers, as I say, I want you to know that I’m very proud of my stock, and consequently Miss Ruth is very dear to me, though I don’t like her mother, and never did. The proud piece! But, laws-a-me, Miss Ruth is the dearest girl, just about the age of you boys, and just like her pa and her grandpa, too.”
Talk like that takes a lot of air. But in stopping to get her wind, the little old lady didn’t waste any time.
“He was the commonest and kindest man I ever knew in all my life, with all of his great wealth—meaning Mr. Corbin Danver, who built this mammoth house and died here—and how his son, Harold, could have quarreled with him, and let the quarrel stand to the separation of the two branches of the family, is more than I can figure out. But a lot of queer things happen in this world—and in the best of families, our own unexcepted.”
“Yes, indeed,” says Poppy, feeling, I guess, that to be polite he ought to say something.
The woman then switched her thoughts to us and smiled as though she had seen worse-looking guys.