"I see," says I. "But I expect Mr. Leavitt will be up."
"What, alone?" says she. "Him? Not much!"
"Oh!" says I, and while I didn't mean it to show, I expect I must have humped my eyebrows a little. Anyway, she comes right back at me.
"Well, why should he?" she demands.
"Why, I don't know," says I; "only he—he's the head of the house, ain't he?"
"No, he ain't," says she. "I don't say it in a boasting spirit, for it's always been one of the trials of my life; but Mr. Leavitt ain't at the head of anything—never was, and never will be."
"Had plenty of chance, I expect?" says I sarcastic.
"Just the same chances other men have had, and better," says she. "Why, when we was first married I thought he was going to be one of the biggest men in this country. Everyone did. He looked it and talked it. Talk? He was the best talker in the county! Is yet, for that matter. Course, he'd been around a lot as a young man—taught school in Rutland for two terms, and visited a whole summer in Bellows Falls. Besides there was the blood, him being an own cousin to Twombley-Crane. Just that was most enough to turn my head, even if that branch of the family never did have much to do with the Leavitt side. But it's a fact that Mr. Leavitt's mother and Twombley-Crane's father were brother and sister."
"You don't mean it!" says I.
"Of course," she goes on, "the Leavitts always stayed poor country folks, and the Cranes went to the city and got rich. When the old homestead was left to Mr. Leavitt, though, he said he wasn't going to spend the rest of his life on an old, worn-out farm. No, Sir! He was going to do something better than that, something big! We all believed it too. For the first six months of our married life I kept my trunk packed, ready to start any minute for anywhere, expecting him to find that grand career he'd talked so much about. But somehow we never started. That wa'n't the worst of it, either. A year slipped by, and we hadn't done a thing,—didn't even raise enough potatoes to last us through Thanksgivin', and if we hadn't sold the hay standing and the apple crop on the trees I don't know how we'd got through the winter.