She is a tall, bony woman, light-complected, sandy-haired, and with big, light-blue eyes. I hadn’t seen her for nineteen years, but she seemed dretful tickled to see me, and says she:
“You look younger, Samantha, than you did the first time I ever seen you.”
“Oh, no!” says I, “that can’t be, Alzina Ann, for that is in the neighberhood of thirty years ago.”
Says she, “It is true as I live and breathe, you look younger and handsomer than I ever see you look.”
I didn’t believe it, but I thought it wouldn’t look well to dispute her any more; so I let it go; and mebby she thought she had convinced me that I did look younger than I did when I was eighteen or twenty. But I only said “That I didn’t feel so young any way. I had spells of feelin’ mauger.”
She took off her things, or “wrappers,” as Tirzah Ann says it is more genteel to call ’em. She was dressed up awful slick, and Josiah helped the driver bring in her trunk. And I told her jest how mortified I wuz about Josiah’s forgettin’ her letter, and her ketchin’ me unprepared. But good land! she told me that “she never in her hull life see a house in such beautiful order as mine was, and she had seen thousands and thousands of different houses.”
Says I, “I feel worked up and almost mortified about my settin’-room carpet bein’ up.”
But she held up both hands—they was white as snow, and all covered with rings—and says she, “If there is one thing that I love to see more than another it is to see a settin’-room carpet up, it gives such a sort of a free, noble look to a room.”
Says I, “The curtains are down in the spare bedroom, and I am almost entirely out of cookin’.”
Says she, “If I had my way, I never would have a curtain up to a window. The sky always looks so pure and innocent somehow. It is so beautiful to set and look up into the calm heavens, with no worldly obstructions between, such as curtains. It is so sweet to sit in your chair, and knit tattin’, and commune with holy nature. And cookin’,” says she, with a look of complete disgust on her face, “why I fairly despise cookin’. What’s the use of it?” says she, with a sweet smile.