“‘Loveday, you don’t know the world,’ says the boy to me. ‘Palmyra ain’t the world!’ says he.”
Loveday rocked. Suddenly she leaned toward me eagerly. “And yet, I believe in that boy! I believe in him!” she said, with conviction, “and if I’d ’a’ been your uncle, or Cyrus, or anybody that had a right, I’d ’a’ gone to that college. I’d ’a’ gone to where them races was and found out more about how things was!”
“Dear Loveday, you have been more loyal to him than any of us—except his own sister!”
“Miss Estelle! She’s a child yet,” said Loveday, sententiously, and I saw that she did not like my exception. Even Loveday had her limitations and she could not realize that eighteen was grown-up; certainly not while one still made pictures. Loveday was going home to Palmyra soon, she said. The noise of the city “flew to her head” and Viola’s soggy pie-crust and Leander’s unmended pantaloons were a weight upon her mind.
The aunt, a mild, little, very old woman, with an incongruously big, guttural voice, came into the room and set forth many reasons why Loveday should stay with her, or visit her oftener, but Loveday was not to be persuaded, declaring that “the Lord hadn’t sot her where there was none too much of her and she wa’n’t one that could be hoppin’ back and forth like a parched pea.”
“She’s got property and plenty to do for her,” said Loveday to me at the door, “and I hain’t got a tallent for livin’ in the city, nohow. It roars like a bull of Bashan and there’s too much of it. I’m one that likes things in moderation, and it hurts my feelin’s to meet so many folks that I don’t know.”
I aroused Octavia, in the gray of the morning. “I’ve been thinking,” I said, “that you needn’t go about with me to-day. You might go with Estelle instead. You know she said she would call here before she set out.”
Now I had several motives in making this suggestion and they all seemed to me very good and praiseworthy ones. In the first place I felt that I could drive a better bargain in sage cheese and preserves, and possibly sausages, by myself, than with Octavia, who, I felt, had a mind above these things, and an unconfessed shrinking from such sordid traffic. Another motive was to foster the sympathy so suddenly developed between Octavia and Estelle. Octavia’s aloofness from “the aliens” had always caused me pangs.
“But there’ll be Alice Yorke,” said Octavia, sleepily considering. “I think we’d better all go together, everywhere. The cheese and sage may be encouraging. I’ve seen the reception that the world gives to literature; it may be enlarging to know how it receives sausages.”
This was bitterly said, but Octavia laughed a little at herself, and added that of course she did not really think that “Evelyn Marchmont” was literature.