“You look very well I think, but I’m sorry to hear you have met with any difficulty,” said I, when she stopped for a moment to take breath.
“Oh, you may say so,” she replied, “but you know you don’t think so in your heart. Why, I did not even stop to put on my bonnet straight,” she said, stealing a look at the glass, “and I ran all the way here, for I felt as if I should die if I could not pour my sorrows into the bosom of some faithful-hearted friend. Oh, I have been treated shamefully, and I feel it the more as you know what a reserved woman I am, and how seldom it is that I open my lips about family matters, even to my dearest friends!”
“Well, but,” I said, “what really is the matter? You have not yet told me what your trouble is.”
“Sister Stenhouse,” she said, “you have had a few little vexations in the course of your life, I know, but they are nothing to compare to the frightful indignities that I have suffered in the course of the last few days. I never thought I should come to this! I hate every man in the place, and I detest my husband most of all, and I loathe his wives, and I execrate Brother Brig—”
“Why, Sister Ann, what can have happened?” I exclaimed, interrupting her.
“Happened!” she cried, starting from her chair in indignation, “I tell you, Sister Stenhouse, nothing has ‘happened’—nothing was done by chance—he did it all with his eyes open and against my advice—I tell you he did it on purpose!”
“Did what?” I asked, “and who was it that did it?” But by this time I had begun to form a shrewd guess who the culprit was.
“Why, he married that wretched little shrimp of a girl, with blue eyes and red hair, and a die-away, lackadaisical manner—it was he—my husband Henry—he married her this very day, and I tell you he did it on purpose!”
“I’m sorry that it annoys you,” I said; “but really I am surprised, after all you have said to me, that you should not care if he had taken half-a-dozen wives, to say nothing of the one he married this morning, and who you say is only a very little one.”
“It doesn’t matter the size, Sister Stenhouse,” she said, “but the colour of the eyes and the shade of the hair matters a great deal. If that miserable little minx had had black hair or green eyes, I daresay Henry would not have cared two straws about her, unless he had done it out of sheer perversity, for all men are made of the same contrary stuff. But he dotes on blue eyes; I heard him myself tell her so one day, when I was listening to them through the crack of the door, and they didn’t know I was so near. But my wounded feelings would not suffer me to remain silent, and I bounced in, and, said I, ‘Henry, how dare you talk such outrageous nonsense to that child in my presence?’