Tim softened. "That's it exactly," he said. "But, Mark, you should have seen Mary Warden when she came here."
"From where?" I asked.
"From Kansas. She lived in some big town out West, and when her mother died there was no one left to her but Luther Warden, her uncle. He sent for her, and now she is living with him. The old man sets a great store by her."
Luther Warden is rich. He has accumulated a fine lot of property above Six Stars—several good farms, a mill and a tannery; but even the chance of inheriting all these did not seem fair compensation for being his niece and having to live with him. He was good to a fault. He exuded piety. Six days of the week he worked, piling up the passing treasures of this world. One whole day he preached, striving for the treasures in that to come. You could not lay a finger on a weak spot in his moral armor, but Tip Pulsifer protected from the assaults of Satan only by a shield of human skin, always seemed to me the better of the two. Tip wore leaky boots all last winter, but when spring came he bought Mrs. Pulsifer a sewing machine. Have you ever worn leaky boots when the snow was banked fence high? Luther Warden's boots never leak. They are always tight and well tallowed. His horses and his cows waddle in their fat, and the wool of his flocks is the longest in the valley. Luther gets up with the sun and goes to bed with it. Some in our valley think his heavy crops come from his six days of labor, and some from his one day of preaching. He says that the one day does it all; but he keeps on getting out with the sun on the other six. I knew that the poor girl from Kansas must get up with the sun, too, for her uncle was not the man to brook any dawdling. I knew, further, that Sunday could not be a day of rest for her, for of all his people she would have to listen to his preaching.
That was why I murmured in a commiserative tone, "Luther's niece—poor girl!"
"You needn't pity her," Tim snapped. "She knows a heap more about the world than you or I do. She—"
"She is not a Dunkard, then?" I interrupted.
"Not a bit," Tim answered. "I don't know what she was in Kansas, but Luther has preached so much on worldliness and the vanity of fine clothes that it wouldn't look right for his niece to go flaunting frills and furbelows about the valley. That plain gray gown is a concession to the old man. He'd like her to wear a prayer-cap and a poke bonnet, I guess, but she has a mind of her own. I think she drew the line there."
She had not given up so much, I thought. Perhaps in her self-denial there was method, and her simple garb became her best. Even a prayer-cap might frame her face the fairest; but she must know. And I had seen that in the flash of her eye and the toss of her head that told me that a hundred Luther Wardens, a hundred Dunkard preacher uncles, could not abate her beauty one jot.
"She's rich," said Tim.