And the judge, smiling, humoured Aunt Sarah, for he knew her and the community in which she lived. “It will cost you just ten dollars,” he said.
“Make out the paper,” Aunt Sarah replied.
One hour later Uncle John and Aunt Sarah left the judge’s house together, separated for life.
Moses, their horse, looked at them out of the corner of his good eye as they approached the carriage.
Uncle John paused, but Aunt Sarah stepped firmly into the vehicle.
Uncle John followed her and took up the reins.
Moses knew the way home by a clairvoyant sense, and he took that way at his own pace of prophet-like dignity.
At the door of the old homestead Uncle John handed Aunt Sarah down from her seat in silence. Then he put Moses into his stall. And when he returned to the house he found Aunt Sarah beaming upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles from her place at the table, which was loaded with a supper such as she alone could cook.
Aunt Sarah was jubilant. She was living at last with a man to whom she was not married; no longer was there a blot on the scutcheon of her intellectual progress; no longer did a black beetle mar the pellucid amber of her simple life of Advanced Ideas; no longer could the acolytes, in off moments when they were not engaged in trundling the spheres through the macrocosm, gaze sternly down upon her through interstellar space and say:
“Aunt Sarah is nearly, but not quite, an intellectual.”