"Well, old Dr. Potter says she's 'neurotic,' if you know what that is. I call it jest notions. What the doctors in my time called a hypo, that's what she is! She's always been the greatest hand to dose. Mr. Conner will have it she kep' old Captain Darter poor buying patent medicines. And she run after every new cure-all going. It was electricity one year, and 'nother year it was blue glass, and one time I remember she had a woman come of the sort that used to call themselves bone-doctors when I was a girl and this country wasn't much settled, but now they're osteologists, or some sech funny name, and give out they can rub everything on earth out of you. Mrs. Darter had her for a long spell, till she got pneumonia, and nigh died, and sickened of the osteologist; and I give her mustard plasters, good strong ones, myself. All this time Emmy was engaged to Albert Glenn; but the old captain was real feeble, and Emmy wouldn't leave him to git married. I will say Mrs. Darter was real devoted to him, though Emmy done all the night work and spared her all she could, give up her school, and spent every cent of the money she'd laid by school-teaching and working art embroidery for her clothes, when she'd be married—spent every cent on her pa. Got him a wheel chair, and if ever a man set the world by his daughter the captain done it. He liked Albert, too. I guess if captain had lived, sick's he was, he'd have found a way so's Emmy and Albert could git married. But he died. Then you'd 'a' s'posed they could marry, for his life was well insured, and they got enough for the widder to be comfortable and keep a girl. But the minnit he died poor Mrs. Darter got nervous prostration, and she was a nervous prostrate for a year, and they had to spend money traveling, and of course Emmy couldn't git married. Mrs. Darter went to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and she went to a sanitarium, and last she come home saying she was cured. But on the cars she made the acquaintance of a woman—well, I don't want to jedge—jedge not, and you won't git jedged, you know—and I know 'tis hard for a woman to make a living, but I guess that woman was a crank, and a designing one at that. But she went to Mrs. Darter's to board, and she never paid no board, but she preached to Mrs. Darter 'bout how all the diseases that we have come from eating wrong things; and she said we'd got to live 'cording to nature more; and eating meat made folks fierce like the carnivorous beasts, and things seasoned with salt was bad for you, and jest plain farnishous foods without salt—like we was chickens!—was best for us. I don't see how Mrs. Darter, who used to cook real well and liked to have the sewing society to tea, could stand sech sick stuff, but she did; and what's wuss, even after the fool critter ran away and married a magnetic healer who, they do say, has another wife, even to this day Abiel Darter believes in her and goes by what she says. And she ain't et any fit food for so long that if she ever does git coaxed to take a wholesome bite of beef or pie her stummick is so weak of course she cayn't stand it. Strong folks can eat strong vituals, and weak folks cayn't. Mrs. Glenn coaxed her in to a boiled dinner one day, and poor Mrs. Darter nearly died of it. Now you cayn't git her to budge from her grass and potato diet, as Conner calls it. And as for poor Emmy, when she can git married Lord only knows!"
Miss Keith had not interrupted the story by as much as a hum of assent. She looked up with a queer smile. "Has Mrs. Darter ever tried Christian Science?"
"No, she ain't," snorted Mrs. Conner; "we've been spared that. The Bigelow girls—they're two single ladies, real nice girls, too, who live in that big brown house with a cupola and a hip-roof there, 'bout two doors up—they tried to get her into that way of thinking; they're at everybody. And they used to go over and set with her and give her 'silent treatment,' they called it, and try to think the dyspepsia out of her; but one of 'em got a fish-bone in her throat and they had to come to me to pull it out with a pair of tweezers. That sorter dampened 'em for a while and Mrs. Darter says, 'Why didn't you think it out?' And then Ann—she's the oldest—says they wasn't far enough advanced yet, Mrs. Darter told 'em then they wasn't far enough advanced to doctor her. And I guess they ain't been there sense."
"All the same," insisted Miss Keith, smiling, "I think Mrs. Darter needs mental healing or Christian Science, I don't care which."
Emmy put her mother to bed. She gave her the soothing drops which the vanished but still reverenced healer had left—drops which she was almost certain owed their potency to some alias of opium. In the morning Mrs. Darter came out of her drugged sleep with a deadly nausea that swathed her muscles and laid her rigid in its limp, devil-fish clutch. The roof of her mouth was like leather; her head seemed to be pounded with hammers; she was burning with fever, and malign twitchings and itchings tormented her to rub her nose incessantly, when the least motion was fearsome to her. She had much more cause than ordinary to moan, and moan she did at every breath. Jinny had rushed away to a small chum the moment the dishes for her own breakfast had been washed; but Emmy couldn't run. She drank a cup of coffee; she had no heart to eat. Jinny, however had eaten the dainty little meal that Emmy had prepared—a forlorn hope to tempt the invalid.
"Oh, my nose! my nose!" wailed Mrs. Darter. "Emmy, you've got to leave off staring out of that window at the Glenns', and come and scratch my nose! Ah-uh! Ah-u-h!"
Emmy silently sat down by the bedside. If Albert passed the yard on his wheel, as he did every morning at half-past seven, he would not find her. Emmy had used no one knows how many devices to always be in the yard when Albert passed, or, at least, in sight by a window. Bert used to say that glimpse of Emmy "was a bracer for the whole day." Thursday night was his night to visit her, but last night he hadn't come.
"Emmy, you ain't any account at all as a scratcher!" fretted her mother. "You scratch where it ain't itching, and you don't scratch where it itches, and you're so mincing! Rub it hard! Oh-h! why must I suffer so? It's hard enough to have a ungrateful child without having your nose itch!"
Emmy adventured a sentence long lurking in her mind, but which she never had the courage to push out into the air: "Mother, I think, I'm sure it is the soothing drops which make your nose itch so. There's opium—"