“How do you do, Simon? I hain’t seen you before, sense you was married, Simon Slimpsey.”
He looked at me almost wildly in the face, and says he in a despairin’ tone,
“I knew it would come to this, Miss Allen! I knew it. I told you how it would be, you know I did. She always said it was her spear to marry, I knew I should be the one, I always was the one.”
“Don’t she use you well, Simon Slimpsey?”
“She is pretty hard on me,” says he. “I hain’t had my way in anything sense the day she married me. She begun to ‘hold my nose to the grindstone,’ as the saying is, before we had been married 2 hours. And she hain’t no housekeeper, nor cook, I have had to live on pancakes most of the time sense it took place, and they are tougher than leather; I have been most tempted to cut some out of my boot legs to see if they wouldn’t be tenderer, but I never should hear the end of it, if I did. She jaws me awfully, and orders me round as if I was a dog, a yeller dog—” he added despairin’ly, “if I was a yeller dog, she couldn’t seem to look down on me any more, and treat me any worse.”
Says I, “I always did mistrust these wimmen that talk so much about not wantin’ any rights, and clingin’ and so forth. But,” says I, not wantin’ to run anybody to thier backs, “she thought it was her spear to marry.”
“I told you,” says he, in agonizin’ tones, “I told you that spear of hern would destroy me, and it has.”
He looked so sorrowful that I says to him in still more jokeuler tones than I had yet used, “Chirk up Simon Slimpsey, I wish you joy.” I felt that he needed it indeed. He give me an awful look that was jest about half reproach, and half anguish, and I see a tear begin to flow. I turned away respectin’ his feelin’s. As he went down the steps slowly, I see him put his hands in his pockets, as if searchin’ for his handkerchief, seemin’ly in vain. But he had on a long blue broadcloth swallow tailed coat that he was married in the first time long years ago, and as he went round the corner he took up the skirts of his coat and wiped his eyes. I said to myself with a deep sithe, “And this is woman’s only spear.” And the words awakened in my breast as many as 19 or 20 different emotions, and I don’t know but more.
I murmured mewsin’ly to myself, “It seems to me, if I was a woman I should about as lives be a constable.”
While I was still mewsin’, Betsey, his wife tore down the street, in a distracted way, and paused before me.