I sunk into a chair and waved my hand towards the door.
He bowed and vanished.
And I, a not knowin’ whether to laugh or to cry, I did both at the same time. I felt meachin’, and small, and provoked, and shamed, and tickled, and mad, and everything.
But anon I thought I must not let this contrarytemps (French) vanquish me. So I called on all the common sense I had, and all the rectitude I had, and I had a real lot of it when I got holt of all of it.
For I realized that my motives wuz as pure as rain water in a new cedar barrel, and so, bein’ dragged up to the tribunal of my own jedgment, I could not find myself to blame; so I determined to keep calm and not let the World or Josiah know what I had been through.
For it wuz a hard blow onto both my jedgment and pride, lookin’ on it with a nateral eye, and I felt that Josiah and the World would be apt to look at it through nateral eyes, and not through the rapt vision of jestice that made me say and say calmly that Josiah wuz the one to blame; for if he hadn’t extracted a promise from me, this contrarytemps would not have occurred.
These large-sized emotions lifted me up quite a good ways, and so I spoze it made the next notch up come easier to me. For as I sot there I moralized—I have been a-relyin’ on mortal ingregients to help me and a-leanin’ on a pardner’s jedgment.
Ingregients have failed, pardner’s jedgment has proved futile—futiler it did seem to me than anything ever had before sence the world begun, as futile as I have found ’em anon and oftener.
So sez I to myself, “What if I should branch out and try the faith cure—turn aside from doctors and pardners, reeds that have broke under my weak grasp?”
I will! I will!