“Law me!” exclaimed Mrs. Plankson, “Emeline Smith was always a great hand for revivals. If she had went less to meetings and had saw more to do in her own house, her children would be better brung up.”
“Seem-me-like there is some spite-work against Emeline Smith amongst the women,” observed Mr. Plankson. “I was a beau of Emeline’s onct. I went to see her the other day, and she laughed, and waved the broom, and acted so glad Jane can’t get over it.”
“You orto married her,” said Mrs. Plankson crisply. “You’d be richer than you are. Her mother was the savin’est person I ever heard of. She give a tea-party one time, and the milk floated in lumps on top the cups. She said she didn’t see how it could be sour, when she had put saleratus in it and boiled it twice! Them Smiths got their money from a rich old aunt, that used to cut up squares of tissue paper to make handkerchiefs. I seen her one time myself, when she was a-visiting the Smiths, come to meeting with a wreath of live geranium leaves around her bonnet, in winter, and them leaves all bit black with the cold! We’ve heard she would set before the parlor fire in city hotels where she boarded, with her dress turned up on her knees, showing her little sticks of legs in narrow pantalets and white stockings, just to save fire in her room—and young ladies obliged to receive young men, with her a-setting there!”
Mr. Sammy coughed gently, for Mrs. Plankson had overlooked his presence in her wrath against Emeline Smith’s relations.
To cover the situation her husband directly inquired, “What’s become of them Ellison girls, seven sisters, that all dressed alike and carried umberellas the same color? They used to walk into church in Indian file. I never in my life seen them go two or three abreast.”
“They all live where they used to and look like they always did. For they was born old-like. Carline,” said Miss Lucy, “took to herb doctorin’. Along about the time that President Garfield was shot, Carline got very dissatisfied. ‘I know just what would fetch that bullet out,’ she used to say, ‘and the only thing that would fetch it out.’”
“And what was that?” inquired Mr. Sammy, rounding his lips and stretching his short neck forward.
“Spearmint tea!”
Mrs. Plankson beat her right palm softly on her left forearm and leaned over, shaking. It would not have been decorous to cackle out loud. The American flag and its Cuban little sister, draped together around the wide doorway of the parlor, swayed in the air. She glanced through the open portal, her oblique eyes slanting up to Miss Lucy’s hanging lamp decorated with feathery asparagus.
“Carline told my niece,” Mrs. Plankson added to the Ellison subject, “why she never got married.”