“Well, I won’t deceive you, Joe,” said I, “I don’t deserve any credit for that.”
“How not?” said he.
“Why, I meant to have spoken to her half-a-dozen times, only one little thing or another stopped it. But I’m very glad of it, for I think you ought to know it first.”
“Well, well,” said he, coming and sitting down again, and staring into the fire, “it’s a precious bad job. Let’s think a bit how we be to tackle it.”
“I know,” said I, drawing up a bit—for I didn’t feel flattered at this speech—“that I’m not in the same position you are in, and that you’ve a right to look for a much richer man than I am for your sister, but—”
“Oh, bother that,” said Joe, beginning to smoke again, and still staring into the fire; “I wasn’t thinking of that. ’Twill be just as bad for we, let who will take her. Here’s mother getting a’most blind, and ’mazing forgetful-like about every thing. Who’s to read her her chapter, or to find her spectacles? and what in the world’s to become of the keys? I be no use to mother by myself, you see,” said Joe, “and I couldn’t abide to see the old lady put about at her time of life; let alone how the pickling and preserving is to go on.”
I was very pleased and surprised to see him taking it so coolly, and particularly that he seemed not to be objecting to me, but only to losing his sister at all.
“Then there’s my dairy,” said he; “that cow Daisy, as gives the richest milk in all the Vale, nobody could ever get her to stand quiet till Lu took to her; she’ll kick down a matter o’ six pail o’ milk a week, I’ll warrant. And the poultry, too; there’s that drattl’d old galleeny’ll be learning the Spanish hens to lay astray up in the brake, as soon as ever Lu goes, and then the fox’ll have ’em all. To think of the trouble I took to get that breed, and not a mossel o’ use at last!”
“Well, but Joe,” said I, “one would think we were going to be married to-morrow, to hear you talk.”
“Well, you want to be married, don’t you?” said he, looking up.