Dressed for her first public appearance in Hart’s Run, Mrs. Bixby was at once more amiable and more overpowering than the cross and disheveled woman whom Julie had seen on the train. An exotic perfume new to the village hung about her. Her green silk dress shimmered in the sun, her feet were squeezed into high-heeled pumps with flashing buckles, while from her ears big green hoops depended, accentuating the breadth and bold commonness of her face, and shaking and gleaming as she turned her head from side to side. She was much taller than Julie, so that she had to look down at her.
“I recollect seeing you on the train, the day we got here,” she announced.
“And that’s Mr. Bixby,” Mrs. Wicket added—rather as an afterthought.
Julie turned and looked into Timothy Bixby’s face as their hands came together for the first time. His was cold from shyness, and Julie knew that hers must feel the same way. Neither of them spoke.
“You must excuse my husband,” Mrs. Bixby said with elaborate jocularity. “The cat got his tongue when he was real little, an’ he’s been dumb ever since.”
The unhappy color suffused Mr. Bixby’s face, and letting go of Julie’s hand, his glance sought the ground in confusion. Then suddenly he raised his eyes and gazed straight at her. She saw his spirit, desperate and impotent, like a caged wild animal, looking out at her. The sight shook her once more with that familiar suffocating anger.
“Oh, well,” she retorted boldly, “what people say isn’t really anything. It’s what they are that matters. I’m not much of a hand for talking myself. Maybe the same cat got my tongue.—Excuse me; I’ve got to go back and speak to Brother Seabrook a minute,” she added suddenly.
Julie reëntered the church and went hastily along the red-carpeted aisle, and with every determined spring of her foot she said to herself, “It’s got to stop—it’s just got to stop right now. Folks have got to let us alone.”
Quickly and decisively she came straight up to Brother Seabrook and paused in front of him. He was busy putting some papers together, and everybody else had left the church. “Brother Seabrook,” she said clearly, “I just came back to ask you—to tell you—you mustn’t call on me to pray.”
Brother Seabrook looked down at her in surprise, his brows over his shoe-button eyes going up protestingly. “Why, my sister, what is this?” he cried. “Not call on you to pray?”