The B. I. L. hunted ’em so’s to hush up the story; it wuz a-hurtin’ him dretfully in the eyes of the meetin’-house. And Anger and Selfishness and Hypocrocy wuz a-holdin’ up their blue-flamed torches to light him on his hunt.
Wall, Annie wuz in deathly fear that they would find her. She had took another name—her mother’s maiden name—but she wuz afraid they would find it out.
She said that she could not live to go through agin what she had gone through with. And yet when I pinned her right down on the subject (a calm, religious pinnin’) she owned up that she did love her husband yet. She cried when she said it.
And I thought to myself that I would cry if I wuz in her place, if I loved such a thing as that.
But she said, and mebby it wuz so, that he would have been all right if it hadn’t been for the influence of the B. I. L. and his bein’ gradual led back into drinkin’ agin by sunthin’ that he thought wouldn’t hurt him. She said that he never would have touched whiskey agin, havin’ promised and broke off.
But he thought, somehow, that the liquid sech a highly religious man wuz a-sellin’ under the name of cider must be sort o’ soothin’ to his insides; but instead of that it set fire to ’em, and his morals and all, and burnt ’em right up.
Annie showed me Ellick’s picter, and it wuz a good-lookin’ face, or kinder good; it would have been handsome if it hadn’t been for a sort of a weak look onto it.
But weak or strong, she loved him. And so I didn’t really know how she wuz a-comin’ out so fur as her own happiness wuz concerned. Wimmen are so queer.
But I chirked her up all I could, told her to keep jest as calm as she could conveniently, and I would take care of her for the present.