“Eva Loud, you ain't goin' to be so silly as to put off your weddin',” Fanny cried out.
“I dunno as I've put it off; I dunno as I want to get married, anyhow,” Eva said, still laughing. “I dunno, but I'd rather be old maid aunt to Ellen.”
“Eva Loud,” cried her sister; “do you know what you are doin'?”
“Pretty well, I reckon,” said Eva.
“Do you know that if you put off Jim Tenny, and he not likin' it, ten chances to one Aggie Bemis will get hold of him again?”
“Well,” said Eva, “let her. I won't have been the one to drag him into misery, anyhow.”
“Well, if you can feel that way,” Fanny returned, looking at her sister with a sort of mixed admiration and pity.
“I can. I tell you what 'tis, Fanny. When I look at Jim, handsome and head up in the air, and think how he'd look all bowed down, hair turnin' gray, and not carin' whether he's shaved and has on a clean shirt or not, 'cause he's got loaded down with debt, and the grocery-man and the butcher after him, and no work, and me and the children draggin' him down, I can bear anything. If another girl wants to do it, she must, though I'd like to kill her when I think of it. I can't do it, because—I think too much of him.”
“He might lose his work after he was married, you know.”
“Well, I suppose we'd have to run the risk of that; but I'm goin' to start fair or not at all.”