I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.
"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.
"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you live along and you find out 'most everything."
I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save by the companionship of the village—the village that has somehow taught Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?
My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.
"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of 'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."
"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.
"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much, and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."
"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter entirely."