"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his tunes—isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."
And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like a valkyr's.
"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house for the family, and keep house, and keep house. It seems as if she's sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do—and her life all mussed up."
Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her own by the tasks of her hand.
"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at her—she's just exactly like those two——"
"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis' Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same living hearts.
And these were not all.
"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy, and I think that they have all understood meadows.
Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of anything as did a generation or two past.
"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus Liva told me—everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"