I know he yearned to box my ears. Instead, he roared, "We are as prone to evil as the sparks to fly upward!"
"You may be," I said. "I shouldn't wonder at all if you are. But as for me, I'm not a miserable sinner and I never was. I shouldn't know an evil impulse if I met it in my mush bowl!" Then I left him, purple with scandalized rage, and found Angelique and told her my pretty plan. Oh, Michael, if you could have seen the poor thing! Her knees fairly gave way under her and she sank into a chair and put her apron over her head. I said, "I thought if you were willing, perhaps the Deacon—" but she cried out, "No, no! One time the oldes' boy, Lem," she still has a bit of the soft habitant accent, "he do something bad, an' I tell a lie, so hees father shall not beat heem. By and by, he fin' out ..." she shut her eyes and shivered. "Heem he beat twice as hard ... me, he nevair believe again, all these years...."
Michael Daragh, I hate the Deacon. I know you consider hate the lowest form of human activity, but I hate the Deacon with a husky, hearty, healthy hate and it has a tonic effect which I'm sure must be good for me. I feed my fancy on boiling him in oil.
Gibbering with perfectly proper rage,
J. V.
The next note which came to the Irishman was only a line in length and a coolly typed line, but even so the letters seemed fairly to sing and to dance——
The story is done. It is good, Michael Daragh.
The letter which followed it went back to the human concerns about her.
Friday.
I'm sitting on the gravestone of the four-time widower, M.D., my sweater turned up about my ears, my fingers navy blue, my nose magenta. The world is bleak and bare, indoors and out. Dan'l grows hourly weaker, but he brightens at mail time, and grins his gallant little grin at disappointment. "But he will," he stoutly whispers.