We got away from the table.
Mary Ann went home and to bed, and if I could have spared the time, I would have had Doctor Johnson “fix me up” too.
What was it Nathan had told himself that night in the office when he had gazed upon Milly after the Carol Gardner disappointment?—Something about “one woman being as good as another?” Sex versus Ladyhood.
“The trouble with most young colts who fly into matrimony with the first exhibit of the sex that sashays along, is that they seem to forget they’re gonna have thirty to fifty years of it,” comments Uncle Joe Fodder, when he hears of some particularly rash marriage about the village. “If a feller can’t be good, b’dam, why can’t he be careful?”
IV
Milly gave it out that Mary Ann was snobbish and “stuck up”, that she couldn’t be sociable and neighborly if it cost her a leg—because she never accepted another invitation from Milly—and her personal opinion was that Nathan’s bosom friend had married a “quince.”
Mary Ann gave a dinner party for a number of the summer colonists on Preston Hill shortly afterward and neglected to invite Milly.
“After me about breakin’ my neck to give her that swell feed to our house in March!” lamented Milly. “She’s a cat and I hope she chokes on her own cream.”
Nathan never referred to the dinner thereafter, however.