“You’ll have to walk on the other side of the road if you do,” said Jeanne Sattory; and they stepped out and took the way up the bluff, two figures indistinct in darkness, with a width of wagon-track between them.
A MAN FROM THE SPANISH WAR
A conversation in Egypt, which is an undefined region of Southern Illinois
Time, 1898
Miss Lucy Mills waited with three early arrivals in her sitting-room. The rest of the people would not gather for half an hour. Her wide house, venerable for the region in which it stood, hugged by vines and mossy roofed, was in perfect order; and sheaves of flowers exhaled fragrance around an object placed in the centre of her parlor. Neighbors no longer trod about on tiptoe, for everything was ready, and the minister might arrive at any moment.
Miss Lucy sat a dignified spinster, whose sympathies ramified through the entire human race. She was so homely that strangers turned to look at her as at a beauty. Mr. Sammy Blade was in his thirties, but she considered him a youth, having helped his mother to nurse him through measles and whooping-cough. Mr. Sammy had a protruding pointed beard and rolled his silly bald head on his shoulders when he talked. He had studied medicine but, failing of practice, was turning his attention to the peddling of fruit-trees. Coming home and hearing the news, he hastened to appear at Miss Lucy’s house.
Mr. and Mrs. Plankson had returned to the neighborhood to visit. The husband was a frisky gray little man, and his wife was a jimp woman in stiff black silk with large lips and shifty eyes.
All three of Miss Lucy’s callers coughed and made the unconscious grimaces of plain people who have not learned the art of expression. They sat with their hands piled on their stomachs. Yet while they longed to get at facts which only Miss Lucy knew, they approached these facts roundabout, bringing newsy bits of their own, and avoiding by common instinct the subject of war with Spain.
“Have you heard that Emeline Smith’s oldest girl has experienced religion?” inquired Mr. Sammy solemnly, breaking the silence of the down-sitting after greetings.
“No, I hadn’t heard it,” responded Miss Lucy, in the soft slow drawl which her candid speech made its vehicle.