“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Allen,” says she, turnin’ red as a red brick, “I never heard of his bein’ chaste, I knew I never could bear the sight of him.”
“The distant sight,” says Alzina Jones.
Ophelia looked so mad at that, that I don’t know but she would have pricked her with her quiltin’ needle, if old Miss Dobbins hadn’t spoke up. She is a fat old lady, with a double chin, mild and lovely as Mount Vernon’s sister. She always agrees with everybody. Thomas Jefferson calls her “Woolen Apron” for he says he heard her one day say to Miss Gowdy—“I don’t like woolen aprons, do you Miss Gowdy?”
“Why yes, Miss Dobbin, I do.”
“Well so do I,” says she. But good old soul, if we was all such peace makers as she is, we should be pretty sure of Heaven. Though Thomas Jefferson says, “if Satan should ask her to go to his house, she would go, rather than hurt his feelin’s.” That boy worrys me, I don’t know what he is a comin’ to.
As I said, she looked up mildly over her spectacles, and nodded her purple cap ribbons two or three times, and said “yes,” “jest so,” to both of us. And then to change the subject says she;
“Has the minister’s wife got home yet?”
“I think not,” says Maggie Snow. “I was to the village yesterday, and she hadn’t come then.”
“I suppose her mother is well off,” says the Widder Tubbs, “and as long as she stays there, she saves the minister five dollars a week, I should think she would stay all summer.” The widder is about as equinomical a woman as belongs to his meetin’ house.
“It don’t look well for her to be gone so long,” says Lucinda Dagget, “I am very much afraid it will make talk.”