CHAPTER XVIII
A WOMAN’S INSTINCT
The women of Barnriff were as keenly alive to the prevailing excitements as the men. Perhaps they were affected differently, but this was only natural. The village, with its doings, its gossip, was their life. The grinding monotony of household drudgery left them little margin for expansion. Their horizon possessed the narrowest limits in consequence. Nor could it be otherwise. Most of them lived in a state of straining two ends across an impossible gulf, and the process reduced them to a condition of pessimism which blinded them to matters beyond their narrow focus.
But just now the cloud had lifted for a moment and a flutter of excitement gave them an added interest in things, and relieved them from the burden of their usual topics. When they met now matters of housekeeping and babies, and their men-folk, were thrust aside for the fresher interests. And thus Pretty Wilkes, blustering out of Abe Horsley’s emporium in a heat of indignation, found little sympathy for her grievance from Mrs. Rust and Jane Restless.
“Say, I’ll give Carrie a word or two when I see her,” she cried, viciously flourishing a roll of print in the faces of her friends. “If Abe isn’t a money grubbing skinflint I just don’t know nothin’. Look at that stuff. Do I know print? Do I know pea-shucks! He’s been tryin’ to sell me faded goods that never were anything else but 196 faded, at twice the price they ever were, when they couldn’t have been worth half of it if the color hadn’t faded that never did, because there wasn’t no decent color to fade. I’ll–––”
But the two women’s attention was wandering. They were gazing across at Eve’s house where Annie Gay was just disappearing through the doorway. Pretty saw her, too, and, in a moment, her anger merged into the general interest.
“Say, if that ain’t the third time this mornin’,” she exclaimed.
“Meanin’ Annie?” inquired Mrs. Rust.
“Chasin’ dollars,” added Jane Restless, with a sniff.