Finally he says, with a sort of a anxious look onto his foreward:
“You don’t feel bad, do you Samantha? You haint jealous, are you?”
“Jealous!” says I, a lookin’ him calmly over from head to feet—it wuz a witherin’ look, and yet pitiful, that took in the hull body and soul, and weighed ’em in the balances of common sense, and pity, and justice. It wuz a look that seemed to envelop him all to one time, and took him all in, his bald head, his vest, and his boots, and his mind (what he had), and his efforts to be fashionable, and his trials and tribulations at it, and—and everything. I give him that one long look, and then I says:
“Jealous? No, I haint jealous.”
Then silence rained again about us, and Josiah spoke out (his conscience was a troublin’ him), and he says:
“You know in fashionable life, Samantha, you have to do things which seem unkind, and Ezra, though a good, worthy man, can’t understand these things as I do.”
Says I: “Josiah Allen, you’ll see the day that you’ll be sorry for your treatment of Druzilla Balch, and Ezra.”
“Oh wall,” says he, pullin’ up his collar, “I’m bound to be fashionable. While I can go with the upper 10, it is my duty and my privilege to go with ’em, and not mingle in the lower classes like the Balches.”
Says I firmly, “You look out, or some of them 10 will be the death of you, and you may see the day that you will be glad to leave ’em, the hull 10 of em, and go back to Druzilla and Ezra Balch.”
But what more words might have passed between us, wuz cut short by the arrival of Ezra and Druzilla in a good big carriage, with Miss Balch on the back seat, and Ezra acrost from her, and a man up in front a drivin’. It wuz a good lookin’ sight, and I hastened down the steps, Josiah disappearin’ inside jest as quick as he ketched sight of their heads.