“Better light,” Braile said again.
The sound of frying which had risen above their voices within had ceased, and after a few quick movements of feet over the puncheon floor, with some clicking of knives and dishes, the feet came to the door opening on the porch and a handsome elderly woman looked out.
She was neatly dressed in a home-woven linsey-woolsey gown, with a blue check apron reaching to its hem in front, and a white cloth passed round her neck and crossed over her breast; she had a cap on her iron gray hair.
Braile did not visibly note her presence in saying, “The woman will want to hear about it.”
“Hear about what?” his wife asked, and then she said to Reverdy, “Good morning, Abel. Won't you light and have breakfast with us? It's just ready. I reckon Sally will excuse you.”
“Well, she will if you say so, Mrs. Braile.” Reverdy made one action of throwing his leg over the claybank's back to the ground, and slipping the bridle over the smooth peg left from the limb of the young tree-trunk which formed one of the posts of the porch. “My!” he said, as he followed his hostess indoors, “you do have things nice. I never come here without wantun' to have my old shanty whitewashed inside like yourn is, and the logs plastered outside; the mud and moss of that chinkun' and daubun' keeps fallun' out, and lettun' all the kinds of weather there is in on us, and Sally she's at me about it, too; she's wuss'n I am, if anything. I reckon if she had her say we'd have a two-room cabin, too, and a loft over both parts, like you have, Mis' Braile, or a frame house, even. But I don't believe anybody but you could keep this floor so clean. Them knots in the puncheons just shine! And that chimbly-piece with that plaster of Paris Samuel prayin' in it; well, if Sally's as't me for a Samuel once I reckon she has a hundred times; and that clock! It's a pictur'.” He looked about the interior as he took the seat offered him at the table, and praised the details of the furnishing with a reference to the effect of each at home. In this he satisfied that obscure fealty of the husband who feels that such a connection of the absent wife with some actual experience of his is equivalent to their joint presence. It was not so much to praise Mrs. Braile's belongings to her as to propitiate the idea of Mrs. Reverdy that he continued his flatteries. In the meantime Braile, who came in behind him, stood easing himself from one foot to the other, with an ironical eye slanted at Reverdy from under his shaggy brows; he dropped his head now, and began walking up and down the room while he listened in a sort of sarcastic patience.
“Ain't you goin' to have anything to eat, Mr. Braile?” his wife demanded, with plaintive severity.
Braile pulled at his cob-pipe which muttered responsively, “Not so long as I've got anything to smoke. Gets up,” he explained to Reverdy, “and jerks it out of my mouth, when we haven't got company.”
“I reckon Abel knows how much to believe of that,” Mrs. Braile commented, and Reverdy gave the pleased chuckle of a social inferior raised above his level by amiable condescension. But as if he thought it safest to refuse any share in this intimacy, he ended his adulations with the opinion, “I should say that if these here two rooms was th'owed together they'd make half as much as the Temple.”
Braile stopped in his walk and bent his frown on Reverdy, but not in anger. “This is the Temple: Temple of Justice—Justice of the Peace. Do you people think there's only one kind of temple in Leatherwood?”