The cousin’s wife came to herself then slowly, smiling and licking her lips that were grown dry with sleeping, and she opened her little placid eyes and said, “Is it so, cousin, and is your little son to be wed?”
The mother’s heart sank a little, and she said, “No, not that,” and then the cousin looked up from where he sat, a little weazened man upon a low bamboo stool, and he sat there twisting ropes of straw for silkworms to spin cocoons upon, since it was the season when they spin, and he said in his spare dry way, “Your son’s wife, then, cousin?”
“Aye,” the mother said heartily, her pleasure back again, and she sat down to pour it out, but she would not seem too pleased either, and she hid her pleasure with complaints and said, “Time, too, and I have waited these eight years and if I had been rich I would have fetched another woman for him, but I thought my younger son should have his chance before I gave his brother two, and marriage costs so much these days even for a second woman, if she be decent and not from some evil place. A very slow woman always that son’s wife of mine, and full of some temper not like mine—cold as any serpent’s temper it is.”
“But not evil, goodwife,” said the cousin justly. “She has done well and carefully always. You have the ducks and drakes now that you did not used to have upon the pond, and she mated that old buffalo you had and got this young one, and your fowls are twice as many as you had and you must have ten or twelve by now, besides all the many ones sold every year.”
“No, not evil,” said the mother grudgingly, “but I wish she could have used heats other than the heats of beasts and fowls.”
Then the cousin’s wife spoke kindly but always full of sleep these days, and she said, yawning as she spoke, “Aye, she is different from you, cousin, to be sure—a full hot woman have you always been and one to do so much, and still hearty. Why, when you walk about, if you have not your flux, I do wonder how you walk so quick. I do marvel, for if I must walk from bench to table and from table to bed, it is as much as I can do these days.”
And the cousin said admiringly, “Aye, and I cannot eat half what I used to do, but I see you sitting there and shouting for your bowl to be filled again and then again.”
And the mother said modestly but pleased at all this praise, “Oh, aye, I eat as well as ever. Three bowls and often four I eat, and I can eat anything not too hard since my front teeth fell away, and I am very sound at such times as I have not got my flux.”
“A very sound old soul,” murmured the cousin’s wife, and then she slept a little and woke again and saw the mother there and smiled her wide sleepy smile and said, “A grandson, did you say? Aye, we have seven now of grandsons alone—and none too many—” and slept again peacefully.