“Oh, yes, they would,” sez she, “they would laugh.”
“Well, mebby you would be in a condition to laugh yourself, which you are fur from bein’ now,” sez I pityin’ly. But I couldn’t convince her, and she stood up on them pinted toes and high, slim heels, and waddled off to the bed where her dress wuz.
And then follered another battle between mind and matter, between too compressed matter, namely a big, fat waist, and a small but firm minded cosset and waist. For a long time the victory seemed to be on the side of the fat body, but it had to gin in, the last button wuz drawed to, the last fortress of flesh, which resisted to the death, wuz overcome and crowded in, and the steel walls of the prison told no tales of the agony within. Heavy skirts wuz adjusted and draped about the achin’ form, the long train lay out on the carpet, and the number six hands crowded into the number four gloves, and Miss Greene Smythe wuz ready to go and enjoy fashionable life. She said she wouldn’t go until dear Mr. Allen come, but we would go and sit down on the balcony, where it would be pleasanter than here.
Well, as we sot there in that upper piazza we could hear plain the voices of Algernon and his nurse, and occasionally the voice of Angenora, enough to show she wuz there, and we heard swear words and nasty words, lots of ’em, words that our grandchildren, in their love-guarded home, had never dremp of and wouldn’t as long as their Pa’s and Ma’s and grandparents had eyes to see and ears to hear. Miss Greene Smythe looked up to me and sez, “I am ashamed of the way that boy talks, but he got it from his nurse, she is good as gold in some things, but has got a voylent temper, and when she is angry she uses awful language, but she don’t have her mad fits often.”
And I sez, “Hain’t you afraid it will ruin the twins to be under such influence now in the most impressionable age?”
And she admitted she had worried some about it, and sez she, “I should got rid of her long ago, but she is a be-a-uti-ful hairdresser, that wuz her father’s bizness, and her mother wuz a dressmaker, and she has natural taste about dress. And you know if hair don’t have proper attention it will lose its gloss and won’t friz as it ought to. And, as for loopin’ up drapery, I have never seen that woman’s equal in my life, my maid is jest nowhere beside her. And goin’ into society as much as I do, you can see how necessary it is I should have some one right in the house that I can depend on, that I can put confidence in as to the hanging of my skirt, and my bangs.”
“Well,” sez I, in a ruther cold axent, “if you don’t see curiouser loopin’s and bangs in the twin’s heads and hearts bime-by than any you ever had in a dress or foretop, then I’ll miss my guess.” And I went on and argued with her for quite a spell for the children’s good.
I tried hard to make her think that the well-doin’ of her children, and the immortal destiny of their souls, wuz of more consequence than the puckerin’s of her dress, or the frizzle of her hair, but I couldn’t seem to make her think as I did, and so I spoze it will have to go on. That girl’s nasty mad swearin’ talk settin’ the example, and the twins follerin’ on and workin’ it out as plain as my grandmother ever worked a blue rose and pink horse from a exampler at school and framed it for us to look at. I knew the sampler the twins wuz workin’ under that woman’s teachin’ wuz goin’ to be framed in a stronger frame than I ever sot eyes on and hung on a higher wall. I felt bad, I knew that the frame wuz as strong as a deathless life, and the wall high as eternity.
Little Angenora’s nurse wuzn’t so fiery dispositioned as Algernon’s. But she give her opiates to make her sleep when she wanted to go out with her bo’s, and hurt her body in that way, and others I don’t want to talk about, but mebby she didn’t hurt her soul so much as she did Algernon’s, ’tennyrate it didn’t show quite so plain now, she didn’t swear so loud as he did, nor throw herself so heavy.