“Yes,” sez I calmly, turnin’ Josiah’s second best vest over and attacktin’ it on the other side (I wuz patchin’ it), “under the shadow of the Holy Heart with His name printed above you you want to desecrate and ravage a heart, sell a heart. There wuz a time when your child’s heart wuz a smooth, ontroubled place, a page with nothin’ writ down on it but domestic names and attachments. Then wuz the time for you to have guarded that white, still place. If you hadn’t wanted Tom Willis to write his name there on the virgin whiteness of that heart why did you let ’em be together day by day and year in and year out? You kep’ still, readin’ your dime novels and discoverin’ your new diseases, of which I dare say you have a variety,” sez I (for I see she looked mad), “you kep’ still and never said a word of warnin’ or command, or disapproval, left them two young hearts jest prepared for their images to be photographed on each other by the divine photography of the Sun of Love, and now when their images are stamped so full and onfadingly that no earthly hand can rub ’em out, now you complain of the imprudence of young people, the recklessness with which they form attachments and the wickedness of it.
“But, Tamer Ann Smith, I tell you now that what you call the imprudence and recklessness is not in Anna, but in her gardeens. Her gardeens that didn’t watch her young heart, her young, careless, springlike, girlish life, that wuz bound to burst into bloom when the sun shone on it. It wuz in your power mebby early in the mornin’ to have picked out the light for her, selected the sun, but after it is once riz and set the world to bloomin’ you can’t do it, you can’t stop the divine freshness, the bird’s song, the sadness, the glory, the pathos, and the power, the light that never wuz on sea or shore, you can’t put up any umbrell to shet off that light, and so I give you warnin’.”
Sez she, “I will do it. Anna shall never marry Tom Willis.”
“You’ve started late in the day to hender it.”
“I will hender it,” sez she.
“Well,” sez I calmly, “time will tell.” And to turn the subject round and please her at the same time, I sez, “How duz your basler mangetus seem to be to-day, and your sinevetus?”
But she wuzn’t to be turned round even by her favorite subject. Sez she, “You like Tom Willis, and you know it.”
Sez I, “I hain’t disputed it.”
“I believe you encourage Anna in thinkin’ of him.”
“Not a word has Anna heard me speak either for or aginst. There wuzn’t any need on’t,” sez I; “it would be too late for me to begin if I wanted to. No, I am simply settin’ still and seein’ things and circumstances pass before me, some as if I wuz settin’ on a bench at a circus.”