Young Orson, regarding the villagers with patient disdain, was amazed to find that they were patronizing him with amusement. They spoke of his adored Boston as an old-fogy place with "no git-up-and-git."
Orson's mother was somewhat comforted when he wrote her that the young women of Carthage were noisy rowdies dressed like frumps. She was a trifle alarmed when she read in his next letter that some of them were not half bad-looking, surprisingly well groomed for so far West, and fairly attractive till they opened their mouths. Then, he said, they twanged the banjo at every vowel and went over the letter "r" as if it were a bump in the road. He had no desire for blinders, but he said that he would derive comfort from a pair of ear-muffs. By and by he was writing her not to be worried about losing him, for there was safety in numbers, and Carthage was so crowded with such graces that he could never single out one siren among so many. The word "siren" forced his mother to conclude that even their voices had ceased to annoy him. She expected him to bring home an Indian squaw or a cowgirl bride on any train.
And so Orson Carver was by delicate degrees engulfed in the life of Carthage. He was never assimilated. He kept his own "dialect," as they called it.
The girl that Orson especially attended in Carthage was Tudie Litton, as pretty a creature as he could imagine or desire. For manifest reasons he affected an interest in her brother Arthur. And Arthur, with a characteristic brotherly feeling, tried to keep his sister in her place. He not only told her that she was "not such a much," but he also said to Orson:
"You think my sister is some girl, but wait till you see Em Terriberry. She makes Tudie look like something the pup found outside. Just you wait till you see Em. She's been to boarding-school and made some swell friends there, and they've taken her to Europe with 'em. Just you wait."
"I'll wait," said Orson, and proceeded to do so.
But Em remained out of town so long that he had begun to believe her a myth, when one day the word passed down the line that she was coming home at last.
That night Tudie murmured a hope that Orson would not be so infatuated with the new-comer as to cast old "friends" aside. She underlined the word "friends" with a long, slow sigh like a heavy pen-stroke, and not without reason, for the word by itself was mild in view of the fact that the "friends" were seated in a motionless hammock in a moon-sheltered porch corner and holding on to each other as if a comet had struck the earth and they were in grave danger of being flung off the planet.
Orson assured Tudie: "No woman exists who could come between us!" And a woman must have been supernaturally thin to achieve the feat at that moment.
But even Tudie, in her jealous dread, had no word to say against the imminent Em. Everybody spoke so well of her that Orson had a mingled expectation of seeing an Aphrodite and a Sister of Charity rolled into one.