And oh! what a harrowin’ and remorseful look he did cast into that wood-box, as he said this.
“She died in the fall. And my feelin’s durin’ that fall I shall never forget. If that thing should happen agin, and my feelin’s prey on me as they preyed then, I couldn’t stand it through more than seven or eight more such cases. I know I couldn’t. I have been careful since then. When I’m obliged to board now I don’t board in any house where there is a woman under seventy-five years of age. And sometimes I am most afraid it is resky then.”[then.”]
And agin he looked as gloomy at that wood-box as I ever see a box looked at. And he waited a minute or two. Mebby he waited for me to say sunthin’ but I didn’t say it, and he kep’ on:
“Several times sense that I have started up, and thought that I would marry anyway, and leave the result. But it has seemed to be broke up every time providential, and I’d make up my mind in the end not to have ’em. But after awhile agin I will start up, and almost make my mind up, that marry I will, no matter what the result may be. But there it is agin; I am too tender-hearted. That is where the stick is with me. I know jest how skurce men are, and how wimmen feel towards ’em. I know jest how they get their minds sot on ’em, and how they feel to loose ’em. I have got principle, Josiah Allen’s wife. I am principle clear to the back-bone.”
“Wall,” says I, “I don’t know but you be. I can’t dispute you, not knowin’ how it is.”
“It may end,” says he, with a bitter look at the woman over the wood-box, “it may end by my not marryin’ at all. But if I don’t marry, where will the blame lie?”
Says he, speakin’ up louder and more excited than he had spoke up:
“I have been blamed; blamed in public places; right in the grocery, and on the post-office steps; blamed by the trustees of the public school; blamed by the old man that keeps the children’s toy-store; blamed by the census man for shiftlessness, and slackness, in not increasin’ the population.
“But where does the blame rest? Is it with me, or with the wimmen that act so like furyation that it is impossible for me to make a choice amongst ’em?
“If I should tell them men that the reason I had lived along, year after year, without marryin’ was that I was so tender-hearted, they would laugh at me.”