“She gave it, all right! She told Miss Bates that you were at home, but that you were going to be married. Thanks to Miss Bates’s activity and interest, the report is widely circulated throughout Auburn.”
Barbara groaned.
“Don’t worry over it,” said her father. “The fact that Miss Bates is standing sponsor for the story will destroy its danger.”
“Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” responded Barbara. “What is the report of my betrothal to an unknown, and therefore harmless, man, as compared with the problem of the Idgit? I don’t want her, I can’t keep her, and yet how am I to get rid of her?”
“Maybe she’ll leave; she told me her family wanted her back,” said Gassy, hopefully.
“I can’t see what for,” said Barbara, “unless it is to kill chickens. That is the one thing she has done without blunder or assistance, since she stepped over our threshold. And unless Addie’s family are given over wholly to a diet of fowl, I fail to see how she could be of any use to them.”
But relief from the Idgit came sooner than was expected. In the middle of an afternoon of canning raspberries, Mrs. Willowby came to inquire about Mrs. Grafton’s health. Barbara slipped off her berry-stained apron, sighed over the fruit-stained nails that no amount of manicuring would whiten, and dabbed some powder on her shiny face. Then she went into the living-room to greet her guest.
Mrs. Willowby was one of the few residents who reconciled Barbara to Auburn. Refinement was her birthright, and in her gentle voice, simple manner, and fine breeding were combined all the aristocracy of old Auburn, and none of its pettiness; all the progress of new Auburn, and none of its crudeness. The miseries of kitchen-work were forgotten, as the two dropped into the dear familiar talk of the college world, that partook of neither servants nor weather, recipes nor house-cleaning.
“It’s a hundred years since I have talked Matthew Arnold with any one,” sighed Barbara. “No, perhaps two months would be nearer the truth. But it seems like a hundred years.”