“I heard Jane Littlefield tell Mis’ Monk she hoped nobody’d ask Mandany’s fool to the sociable. And Mr. Fletcher’s boy told me that’s what folks called me.”
“Damn Jane Littlefield! Damn that little devil of a boy!”
These dreadful words burst out furiously.
Perhaps Ann did not look as shocked as she ought.
In a moment she smiled her immature, simple smile that had a touching appeal in it.
“‘T ain’t no use denyin’ it,” she said; “I ain’t jes’ like other folks, ‘n’ that’s a fact. I can’t think stiddy more ‘n a minute. Things all run together, somehow. ‘N’ the back er my head’s odd’s it can be.”
“Pooh! What of it? There can’t any of us think stiddy; ‘n’ if we could what would it amount to, I should like to know? It would n’t amount to a row of pins.”
Ann dropped her work and clasped her hands. Mr. Baker saw that her hands were hard, and stained almost black on fingers and thumbs by much cutting of apples.
“Ye see,” she said, in a tremulous voice, “sometimes I think if mother had lived she’d er treated me so ‘t I could think stiddier. I s’pose mother’d er loved me. They say mothers do. But Aunt Mandany told me mother died the year I got my fall from the cherry-tree. I was eight then. I don’t remember nothin’ ‘bout it, nor ‘bout anything much. Mr. Baker, do you remember your mother?”
Mr. Baker said “Yes,” abruptly. Something made it impossible for him to say more.