“The type? Is that the name of the story?” questioned the woman at the wash-tub.
“The print I should say. Thank you for letting me come. But I am sorry to leave those dishes.”
“Don’t be sorry. My kitchen will be very sweet when the syringas are out. And don’t think I’m always so late with my washing. It was all his folks.”
“How is Nettie these days?”
“Miserable enough. She doesn’t know how to get outside of her poor little self. But then, who of us does, until we are pulled out?” she asked, with cheerful philosophy, as Miss Affy went away past the syringa bushes.
Miss Affy spent an hour in Nettie Evans’s chamber, telling the little girl stories about her great-niece, Judith Mackenzie, who lived in the city with her dear, sick mother, and they both were soon coming to Bensalem, and Judith would love to visit her often, and Judith told stories, that were worth telling; last summer in the evenings, in Summer Avenue, she had a dozen boys and girls on the steps, listening to her stories continued from one evening to another. Nettie’s white face grew glad, and in the night she was comforted by the thought of the coming of the story-teller. Then Miss Affy crossed the street to the one-story yellow house and read from a Sunday-school library-book to blind Mrs. Trembly, whose only daughter had little time to spare her mother from her housekeeping and dressmaking, and on her way home, stopped at the Post-office with “Samuel Budget.”
At the supper table, she remarked to Cephas and her sister Rody: “I do hope our new minister will have a good wife. Bensalem needs the ministry of a woman—a real deaconess.”
“As if you weren’t one,” said Cephas, with admiration in his eyes.
“But I’m not the minister’s wife.”
“Nor anybody else’s,” retorted Aunt Rody, sharply, with a look at the bald-headed, white-whiskered man opposite her at the foot of the table. The look passed over him instead of going through him, as he gave a laugh, a contented laugh that hurt Aunt Rody, even more than she had intended her look to hurt him.