"Poker chips are neither here nor there," said Sidney, in the lofty, judicial tone which she had maintained throughout the controversy.
She eyed Miss Pettus, however, silently and a little severely, as she loosed several rounds of yarn from her big ball, and held them out and deliberately shook them apart at arm's length. It did not please her to hear of poker chips—or anything else of interest—through Miss Pettus or any other person. It was her own special and exclusive province to discover and distribute the news. She felt much as the editor of a great daily newspaper might feel if some casual passer-by should drop in to tell him of the day's greatest public event.
"Poker chips are neither here nor there," she repeated coolly, and almost contemptuously, as one looking to larger things. "No matter what Anne Watson does, and no matter how she does it, there's one thing that you may always be sure of, Miss Pettus, and that is—that she believes she is doing right."
"Who said she didn't?" retorted Miss Pettus. "Have I said anything about the right or wrong of it? I don't care anything about the right or wrong of card-playing. Some folks think one way and some another—and they may go on thinking so for all me. What I do say is that a body ought to stick to what she does believe, whatever it is, no matter whether she's a Methodist like me or a Christian like Anne."
"Well—'pon my word!" exclaimed Sidney, seeing a chance for reprisal, and furtively winking the eye next to the doctor's wife. "To hear you talk, Miss Pettus, folks would think there wasn't anybody but Methodists and Christians. Where, pray, do the rest of us come in? There's Jane there—a Cumberland Presbyterian, dyed blue in the wool. Yonder's Miss Judy, an Episcopalian of the highest latitude and the greatest longitude, and a-training Doris to be just like her. And here am I—a Baptist—a Baptist born and a Baptist bred—and a Whiskey Baptist at that."
"If I were you, Sidney Wendall," replied Miss Pettus, with offended dignity, "I wouldn't make fun of my own religion if I did make fun of every other earthly thing I came across. You know as well as I do, and as Jane here does, that there is no such thing as a Whiskey Baptist—and never was and never will be."
"No such thing as a Whiskey Baptist?" exclaimed Sidney, pretending to be wholly in earnest, and slyly winking again at the doctor's wife. "Then what, may I ask, would you have called my own father and his only brother—two church members in good and regular standing, and two as good and highly respected citizens as this Pennyroyal Region ever had, to boot? What else could you call them, I ask you, 'Mandy Pettus? Didn't they always pay their debts on the stroke of the town clock, and to a hundred cents on the dollar? Didn't they always vote the straight Democratic ticket for fifty years, without ever a scratch from end to end? Didn't they always get drunk on every county court day of their lives, and keep sober all the rest of the year? No Whiskey Baptists indeed!"
"What's all that tirade got to do with what I said about Anne's—and everybody's—being what they pretend to be?" fumed Miss Pettus. "That's what I said and what I'll keep on saying as long as I have the breath to speak my honest mind. And I'll say it about anybody, no matter who, just the same. Chopping and changing till a body don't know where to find you, looks to me just as bad in one denomination as another. And levity in those who ought to be serious-minded is levity to me wherever I find it. Now, look at our own circuit rider, only last Sunday! After that powerful sermon which warmed up the whole town, and shook the dry bones, what did he do?—right out of the pulpit, too,—but stop and hang over the fence like a schoolboy for a laughing confab with Kitty Mills! There she was, of course, standing out in the broiling sun with nothing but her apron thrown over her silly head, while you could hear old man Mills scolding her, the whole blessed time, at the top of his peevish voice. It was perfectly scandalous and nothing but scandalous to see such goings-on on the Lord's Day. Kitty was telling him about her late young turkeys getting out in that last hard rain and holding up their heads with their mouths wide open, till the last one of them drowned. As if there was anything uncommon or funny in that; as if everybody didn't know that young turkeys always did that whenever they got a chance. And the simpletons were both laughing as if they'd never heard such a joke, and as if it had been Monday instead of Sunday, and the circuit rider hadn't had any good work to do."
"Maybe he thinks that is a part of his good work," said the doctor's wife, gently. "Kitty Mills surely needs all the kindness she can get outside her own family, poor thing, though she doesn't seem to know it."
Sidney smiled at a sudden recollection. "I passed there yesterday, in the heat of the day, and saw her in the garden bending over and pulling the weeds out of her handful of vegetables. It made me real uneasy to look at her leaning down so long and steady, and her so short and stout, and I said so. But she only laughed till she cried, and declared there wasn't any danger except to her corset-boards. Then, when she could speak for laughing, she said she had saved almost enough to stick her bunch peas. And,—if you'll believe it,—Sam left the garden gate open last night, and the pigs got in and eat every one of 'em up."