“Don’t you mind me,” he says, “I got hit in a sore spot. I—guess I’ll be stayin’ out here a little while.”
Pretty soon he went out and sat on the wood pile, and I took some supper out to him on a pie-tin, and I told him then that we wanted to have Donnie to the table with us.
He looked up at me kind of suffering.
“I wouldn’t want to refuse you anything,” he says, “but—will they say any more things like that?”
Right with the sweep of my wondering at him, that I’d never heard a man speak like him before, come a sweep of shame and of grieving and of being kind of mad, too.
“No, sir,” says I. “We won’t have any more of that. What’s the good o’ being hostess if you can’t turn your guests out of the house?”
I went back into the house, and marched into the sitting-room. I donno what I was going to say, but I never had to say it. For there was Mis’ Puppy, wiping her eyes on the red table-cover she’d scorned, and she was sitting on the arm of Mis’ Pettibone’s chair.
“Them things hadn’t ought to be said, ladies,” says she, as well as she could. “I can’t take back what I said about the table-cover, being it’s what I think. But I wish I’d kep’ my mouth shut, and I don’t care who knows it.”
I thought then, and I still think, it was one of the honestest and sweepingest apologies I ever heard.
And all at once everybody kind of got up and folded their work, and patted somebody on the elbow; and I see we was feeling a good deal the way we had in the rig the night before; and it come to me, kind of big and dim, that with the job we was doing, we couldn’t possibly nip out at one another, like we would in just regular society. And all I done was to sing out, “Your supper’s ready and the toast’s on the table.” And we all went out, lion and lamb, and helped to set Donnie up on my ironing-stool for a high chair. And it made an awful pleasant few minutes.