“I always thought so much of Serene,” said Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife. “We was taken into full church membership on the same day; and we used to run together and swap dinners at the Gum College. Aunt Lindy was so hard on her. I’ve asked Serene to go home with me and stay as long as she wanted to. But she has to take that horse and buggy back. And I don’t think she could stand it, so near the old home.”
“Now what do you think?” said Jesse Jeffries’ wife, coming in, with her black-mitted hands pressed together. “Things is willed to Sereny, after all.”
The bedroom resounded with ejaculations.
“How do you make that out?” inquired Little Jimmy Holmes’s wife. “I’d give all my yearlin’ calves to have it so.”
“There was another piece wrote on to the paper, that Jesse missed. ’Pears like Mozy cut her off, and then repented, and went right to another lawyer and had it fixed, for it’s in two different handwrites. Things stands just as they did in the first.”
“I’m sorry Lindy gets her yearly portion,” said Mrs. Holmes, in an irreverent aside. “Let me get out of this crowd: I’m goin’ to hug Serene.”
“I thought ’twas a great pity,” exclaimed the woman with pins in her mouth, bestowing them rapidly about her bonnet ribbons, “if Sereny couldn’t have the homestead to bring up her boy in!”
“You said folks never found new wills!” observed a neighbor triumphantly.
“Well,” retorted the woman, turning her face from side to side to get her chin set properly in the bonnet ribbons, “they didn’t find any. Jesse Jeffr’s only fooled around and didn’t read all of the first one. They might ’a’ knowed Jesse Jeffr’s ’ud make a mess of it. He don’t know how to do a thing right.”
This opinion was shielded from the ear of Mrs. Jesse. She was busy nodding her leghorn bonnet and exchanging parting civilities with several old neighbors.