Betsey still looked unconvinced, and I proceeded onwards.
“Now I never was any hand to stand and smile at Josiah for two or three hours on a stretch, it would make me feel like a natural born idiot; but I always have a bright fire, and a warm supper a waitin’ for him when he comes home at night.”
“Oh food! food! what is food to the deathless emotions of the soul. What does the aching young heart care for what food it eats—let my deah future companion smile on me, and that is enough.”
Says I in reasonable tones, “A man can’t smile on an empty stomach Betsey, not for any length of time. And no man can’t eat soggy bread, with little chunks of salaratus in it, and clammy potatoes, and beefsteak burnt and raw in spots, and drink dishwatery tea, and muddy coffee, and smile—or they might give one or 2 sickly, deathly smiles, but they wouldn’t keep it up, you depend upon it they wouldn’t, and it haint in the natur’ of a man to, and I say they hadn’t ought to. I have seen bread Betsey Bobbet, that was enough to break down any man’s affection for a woman, unless he had firm principle to back it up—and love’s young dream has been drounded in thick, muddy coffee more’n once. If there haint anything pleasant in a man’s home how can he keep attached to it? Nobody, man nor woman can’t respect what haint respectable, or love what haint lovable. I believe in bein’ cheerful Betsey; a complainin’, fretful woman in the house, is worse than a cold, drizzlin’ rain comin’ right down all the time onto the cook stove. Of course men have to be corrected, I correct Josiah frequently, but I believe in doin’ it all up at one time and then have it over with, jest like a smart dash of a thunder shower that clears up the air.”
“Oh, how a female woman that is blest with a deah companion, can even speak of correcting him, is a mystery to me.”
But again I spoke, and my tone was as firm and lofty as Bunker Hill monument—
“Men have to be corrected, Betsey, there wouldn’t be no livin’ with ’em unless you did.”
“Well,” says she, “you can entertain such views as you will, but for me, I will be clingin’ in my nature, I will be respected by men, they do so love to have wimmin clingin’, that I will, until I die, carry out this belief that is so sweet to them—until I die I will nevah let go of this speah.”
I didn’t say nothin’, for gratitude tied up my tongue, but as I rose and went up stairs to wind me a little more yarn—I thought I wouldn’t bring down the swifts for so little as I wanted to wind—I thought sadly to myself, what a hard, hard time she had had, sense I had known her, a handlin’ that spear. We got to talkin’ about it the other day, how long she had been a handlin’ of it. Says Thomas Jefferson, “She has been brandishin’ it for fifty years.”
Says I, “Shet up, Thomas J., she haint been born longer ago than that.”