“Your clothes don’t bind you, Josiah, and you know I always seek comfort first, hopin’ mebby good lookin’ things may be added unto me. And as for politeness, you don’t strain yourself much that way, and I’d love to see some of these friends we owe visits to.”
He sez, “Don’t you want to go to Nestle Down agin?” And I sez, “No, I did all the nestlin’ I wanted to once.”
Well, it wuz a number of days before he gin his consent, but finally he did, and we sot off, and our first visit wuz to Alcander and Fidelia Pogram’s.
We had been owin’ ’em visits for some time. They’re movin’ planets, and revolve round considerable, and always have. We are stars, Josiah and me, that are more fixed in our orbits. It wuz on one of Alcanderses revolutions (with of course his satellite Fidelia a-revolvin’ round him) that they lived neighbor to us for over two years, and I got real attached to Fidelia. She is a conscientious, painstaking woman, and her husband is well off, and naterally good-natered and well-meanin’. But when they wuz first married Fidelia made a Molok of him, and burnt incense before him day and night, burnin’ up on that altar all her own preferences and desires, all her chances of recreation and rest, all her own ideals, her own loves.
Never tryin’ to lift herself up and look abroad into the sunlight, and foller it outdoors into happiness—no; she jest sot crouched before that altar till her eyes got dim with the smoke of her sacrifice and she couldn’t straighten up. And the cloud of incense she wuz offerin’ up to him from day to day wuz so heavy between ’em that he’d lost sight of her; and bein’ at his feet, instead of by his side where she belonged, he couldn’t see her very well, and she seemed to be quite a distance away from him. She had made over by such doin’s his naterally generous disposition into a selfish, overbearin’ one. He wuz about as innocent as a babe of the way it wuz done, and she, too. But, take it all in all, she had made about the worst botch of married life that I had ever seen made, and she all the time jest as conscientious and religious as old Job or Zekiel or any of ’em; and he, too, thought that he wuz jest as good as Obadiah or Jonah or Enoch. And, what made it seem still worse to me, she wuz bringin’ up her girl in the same way.
Elinor wuz goin’ on twenty-one, and had a bo, Louis Arnold by name. Her Ma had told me about it the year before, and I had noticed that Elinor looked real rosy and sweet. That wuz in the first days of courtship, and I could see that the spell wuz upon her. The earth wuz glorified; the heavens bent down clost to her; she and Louis wuz a-walkin’ through Eden. But the next time I see Elinor she looked considerable faded and anxious-eyed; for all the world her eyes looked like her Ma’s—lovin’ and faithful as a dog’s, and as anxious lookin’ as a dog’s when it has been doin’ sunthin’ and expects a whippin’. I had hearn from a neighbor that Louis wuz of late growin’ cool in his attentions to Elinor. And I felt bad, for I mistrusted how it wuz done. She had sot him up on such a hite that he looked down on her. Good land! with her poster, he had to look down if he see her at all. The neighbor said that it wuz spozed that Elinor wuz goin’ into a decline, and sez she: “That Louis Arnold is a villian. He paid her attention for a year and won her love, and wuz as good as engaged to her, and she doin’ everything under the sun to keep his love, and then he grew cool and drawed off. He is a villian!” she repeated.
“Well, mebby there is blame on both sides.”
And agin she sez, “Elinor did everything to hold him, and duz yet, for she still hopes to keep him.”
And I sez, “Mebby she did too much.”
And the neighbor glared at me, and sez coldly, “I don’t understand you.”