“He isn’t much like Macbeth.”
“I don’t know that. You were asking about this book. I don’t read books much. I can find out people right soon; books—they puzzle me.”
“But you have read it?”
“Yes, I read it. I read it twice. I sort of set myself to believe it the second time. There’s a heap I didn’t understand.”
“And Lady Macbeth?”
“She was a queer one. All that howling and a-carrying on of the witch-women, it’s just nonsense. I got the idea those witches set it up to tell the man he was to be a king: that’s straight, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“’T isn’t wholesome to get notions; they stick like bur-ticks. I knew a girl down at Marysville, in Georgia, and an old black woman told her, for her fortune, she was to marry a thin man with heaps of money, and the fool was so awful took with this that she told her beau. He was a direful stout man. Well, when she wouldn’t have him, he went off and tried to starve himself thin; and the end was he fell away and died, and that girl, she never got another beau, fat or thin.”
Ned and his aunt laughed.
“Well, what else, Dorothy?”