“Don’t you like her?” said Job in a doubtful tone.
“‘Don’t you like her?’ said Job, in a doubtful tone.” [Page 54.]
“She’s very beautiful, Uncle Job, but—but”—and Lucy hesitated—“I shouldn’t want any one I cared for to love a woman like that.”
“Waal, I can’t say’s I would myself,” said Job. “But this ain’t a woman, you see; it’s one of them nimps. They wa’n’t like real human girls, you know.”
“But she is not kind,” said Lucy, with a little shiver. “She would see men drowning before her eyes, and would not put out her hand to help them. I think she took those pearl bracelets and her necklace from some poor dead girl she found floating in the sea. She wouldn’t mind; she would only care to dress herself with them.”
“I won’t say but that’s my notion of her too,” said Job. “Do you know, Lucy,” he continued, in a lower voice, “I can’t help feeling as if there was something more than common in this bit of wood all the while I’ve been doing it? It seemed as if ’twa’n’t me that was making of it up, but I was jest like some kind of a machine going along on some one else’s notion. Sometimes I am half skeered at the critter myself.”
“You meant to make her like Anna Jane Shuttleworth, didn’t you?” asked Lucy, suddenly.
“Waal, yis, I did kind o’ mean to give her a look of Anna Jane, ’cause Torrey, he’s so set on her, but I’ve got it more like her than I meant. Somehow, it seems as if it was more like her than she is herself.”
Lucy gave one more long look at the figure “I must go,” she said, with a little start. “Good-bye, Uncle Job;” and she flitted away by a side door.