“Yes, I’m well fixed,” murmured Wilda.
—“but you have to leave your mother and go out among the neighbors to airn a living. How do you know sometime the house won’t burn down?”
“I am jub’ous about it often,” owned Wilda, biting the end of a knitting-needle. But catching the yarn over her little finger she drove it ahead with her work.
“Then eventually she might die.”
“I’ve thought of that,” sighed Wilda. “And I’ve thought what’d become of her if I’s to be taken and her left. Then who’d let her pet rooster and hen—that she’s just as tickled with as a child—roost in the house, and clean after them without fretting her?”
Alanson glanced at Speckle and Banty sticking like balls to their perch, and he volunteered some discreet possibilities.
“When folks begins to get used to such things before they’re too old and sot in their ways, seems to me like chickens in the house would be natteral enough—though not brought up to it.”
Whenever Alanson made this great concession, Wilda always fell back upon her observations of marriage.
“But there’s Mary Jane Willey. She had fifteen hundred dollars in her own right, and was well fixed with bedding and goods—six chairs and a bread-trough and a cupboard. And all that didn’t satisfy her, but she must have a man to speckalate with her money and lose it; and now he’s took to drinking, her and her children are like to go on the county.”
Alanson interlaced his fingers across his chest and set his thumbs to whirling.