What do you think Blue-Eyes said? This is the way she "gave me fits." Looking up prettily to my aunt, she says:
"Oh, madam, I am so sorry for your carpet."
"Your dress!" exclaimed Aunt Jerusha.
"Never mind that, madam. It can go to the laundry."
"Well, I never!" continued aunt, flying about for a towel, and wiping her off as well as she could; "but John Flutter is so careless. He's always blundering. He means well enough, but he's bashful. You'd think a clerk in a dry-goods store would get over it some time now, wouldn't you? Well, young ladies, I'll get some more milk for you; but I won't trust it in his hands."
When Aunt Jerusha let the cat out of the bag about my bashfulness, Blue-Eyes flashed, at me from under her long eyelashes a glance so roguish, so perfectly infatuating, that my heart behaved like a thermometer that is plunged first into a tea-kettle and then into snow; it went up into my throat, and then down into my boots. I still grasped the server and stood there like a revolving lantern—one minute white, another red. Finally my heart settled into my boots. It was evident that fate was against me. I was doomed to go on leading a blundering existence. My admiration for this lovely girl was already a thousand times stronger than any feeling I had ever had for Belle Marigold. Yet how ridiculous I must appear to her. How politely she was laughing at me.
The sense of this, and the certainty that I was born to blunder, came home to me with crushing weight. I turned slowly to Aunt Jerusha, who was bringing fresh milk, and said, with a simplicity to which pathos must have given dignity:
"Aunt, will you show them the way to Widow Cooper's? I am going to the barn to hang myself," and I walked out.
"Is he in earnest?" I heard Blue-Eyes inquire.
"Wall, now, I shouldn't be surprised," avowed Aunt Jerusha. "He's been powerful low-spirited lately. You see, ladies, he was born that bashful that life is a burden to him."