"Oh, there will be no slip between the lip and the dipper in this case, if that's what is bothering you," the contractor said. "They will get married now, for they are both simply crazy about each other."
"Listen to me, Sam Cavanaugh," Mrs. Cavanaugh threw out quickly. "I want to get down to the rock bottom of this thing without any ifs and ands. I want to know one thing. It may make you mad, because you said once that I was meddling in John's business, but I want to know if—if them folks up there—the girl's daddy and mammy, and the girl herself—I want to know if they know about—about John's mother and Jane Holder, and—and—"
"Make me mad?" Cavanaugh actually got up, drew his chair out, and grasped the back of it angrily. "You knew it would make me mad. You have always made me mad by fetching that poor, unsuspecting boy into the dirty ways of them two women. He's never had his eyes open about that, nohow. He is too pure-minded, too busy with his work, too dreamy to stop and compare his folks, bad as they are, with others. But if you think that I am going to take up a bucketful of slime—and other folks' slime at that—and dash it into the blooming faces of that happy, innocent pair of sweethearts, you don't know me. A catty old maid would go a thousand miles to get a chance to do it, but no man with sound blood in his veins and a heart in his chest would do it for high pay. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for thinking of it—even for letting it dirty your mind for a minute."
Mrs. Cavanaugh, unconvinced and with a ponderous shrug, began to pile the dishes together. "You are a man and can't understand," she said. "Any woman would know what I mean."
"And she'd know more than you mean, too, if she was a woman," Samuel sneered, testily.
His wife received this in dead silence. She pushed her gold-rimmed spectacles up into her flowsy gray hair and let them rest there, and, as if regretful of his heat, Cavanaugh added, more gently, "It is a pity for you and me to fly up like this when I've just got home."
"You and me?" she answered, mildly and with a tantalizing smile. "Huh! how high do you think I flew, Sam Cavanaugh? I've certainly been on a dead level, but you went over the church steeples like a hot-air balloon in a wind-storm. I'm on the ground, flat-footed, and I'm going to stay on it. I look beyond the end of my nose, and you don't, that's all. You can build houses, but you can't start families out right in a town like this one. Now listen to me. What do you think that poor girl will do in Pete Carrol's house all by herself? Who will go to see her? What church will she attend? What will she do—in the name of all possessed, what will she do with her mother-in-law?"
Cavanaugh, as he sat down again, slid lower into defeat than he had been for many a day. "Listen to me," he began, resting his folded hands on the table and clearing his throat, for his voice was husky. "Now you have hit on something, and I'm going to be plain about it. I don't often speak about my terrible struggles over spiritual matters and the things I sometimes have to settle between me and my Maker, but I'm going to admit that I did let all that business bother me at first. I got so keyed up over it up there at Cranston that I couldn't hardly think of anything else for quite a while. I had private talks with this Bible student and that in a roundabout way to see if I couldn't arrive at a decision, but couldn't seem to get anywhere. They all said the clean must be kept away from the unclean—that you couldn't handle manure without smelling of it, and that goats stink and cows don't. But one night, while I was lying in my hot bed, unable to doze off, and thinking—thinking whether I ought to tell that hard-faced old hypocrite, Whaley, the thing that I was sure would kill poor John's chances to get his first happiness in his own little cottage—I was lying there, I say, when the thought come to me, as sudden as a streak of lightning, that an all-wise God created Liz Trott and Jane Holder and permitted temptation to meet them. The same God made John's daddy and let him go to his grave with a lowered head. The same Power fetched John into the world in that joint of hell over there and put one of the soundest heads on his shoulders that I ever run across. The same Power caused me to see the boy loafing about town and shooting craps with the negroes, and induced me to hire him. I never regretted it. I love to see him climb as much as if he was my own flesh and blood, and—and I simply love the little hard-working girl he has picked out. All that flashed on me, and I got up and prayed. Right there I laid the whole thing before God, and something seemed to tell me that Jesus was right when he said we must first get the beam out of our eyes before using a spy-glass on the eyes of others. That was enough for me. The subject hasn't bothered me since. Them folks up there at Cranston will never hear about Liz Trott and her doings from me."
Mrs. Cavanaugh shrugged again. She went for her dish-pan and began to put the dishes into the hot water it contained.
"Well, what have you got to say?" her husband demanded.