BY
Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
This is a story of character against a New England background. Each character is worked out with the delicacy and minuteness of a cameo. Each is intensely realistic, yet, as in the cameo, palely flushed with romance. “Mother,” along with her originality of action and long-concealed ideals, has the saving quality of common-sense, which makes its powerful appeal to the daily realities of life. Thus when “Father,” dazed by the unexpected revelation of the character and ideals of the woman he has misunderstood for forty years, stands uncertain whether to assert or to surrender his long-established supremacy, she decides him in her favor by a practical suggestion of acquiescence: “You’d better take your coat off an’ get washed—there’s the wash-basin—an’ then we’ll have supper.”
THE REVOLT OF “MOTHER”[18]
“Father!”
“What is it?”
“What are them men diggin’ over there in the field for?”
There was a sudden dropping and enlarging of the lower part of the old man’s face, as if some heavy weight had settled therein; he shut his mouth tight, and went on harnessing the great bay mare. He hustled the collar on to her neck with a jerk.