"I'm Mrs. Harry Beecher," she says. "I—we were just married last week," she says, neat as a biography.
"So you was!" I says. "Well, now, you just let me be to you what your folks would want me to be, won't you?" says I. "Feel," I says, "just like you could run in over to my house any time, morning, noon or night. Call on me for anything. Come on over and sit with me if you feel lonesome—or if you don't. My side porch is real nice and cool and shady all the afternoon—"
And so on. And wasn't that nice to happen to me, right in the middle of the dead of summer, with nothing going on?
If you have lived in the immediate neighborhood of a bride and groom, you know what I am going to tell about.
But if you haven't, try to rent your next house—if you rent—or try to buy your next home—if you buy—somewhere in the more-or-less neighborhood of a bride and groom. Because it's an education. It's an education in living. No—I don't believe I mean that the way you think I mean it at all. I mean it another way.
To be sure, there were the mornings, when I saw them come out from breakfast and steal a minute or two hanging round the veranda before he had to start off. That was as nice as a picture, and nicer. I got so I timed my breakfast so's I could be watering my flower-beds when this happened, and not miss it. He usually pulled the vines over better, or weeded a little near the step, or tinkered with the hinge of the screen, or fussed with the bricks where the roots had pushed them up. And she sat on the steps and talked with him, and laughed now and then with her little pretty laugh. (Not many women can laugh as pretty as she did—and we all ought to be able to do it. Sometimes I wish somebody would start a school to teach pretty laughing, and somebody else would make us all go to it.) And I knew how they were pretending that this was really their own home, and playing proprietor and householder, just like everybody else. And of course that was pleasurable to me to see—but that wasn't what I meant.
Nor I didn't mean times when she'd be out in the garden during the day, and the telephone bell would ring, and she would throw things and head for the house, running, because she thought it might be him calling her up from the city. Most usually it was. I always knew it had been him when she came back singing.
And then there were the late afternoons, say, almost an hour before the first train that he could possibly come on and that now and then he caught. Always before it was time for that she would open her front door that she'd had closed all day to keep her house cool, and she'd bring her book or her sewing out on the porch, and never pay a bit of attention to either, because she sat looking up the street. There was only a little bit of shade on her porch that time in the afternoon, and I used to want to ask her to come over on my cool, shady side porch, but I had the sense not to. I sort of understood how she liked to sit out there where she was, on their own porch, waiting for him. Then he'd come, and she'd sit out in the garden and read to him while he dug in the beds, or she'd sew on the porch while he cut the grass—well, now, it don't sound like much as I tell it, does it?—and yet it used to look wonderful sweet to me, looking across the street.
But as I said, it wasn't any of these times, nor yet the long summer evenings when I could just see the glimmer of her white dress on the porch or in the garden, or their shadows on the curtain, rainy evenings; no, it wasn't these times that made me wish for everybody in the world that they lived next door to a bride and groom. But the thing I mean came to me all of a sudden, when they hadn't been my neighbors for a week. And it came to me like this:
One night I'd had them over for supper. It had been a hot day, and ordinarily I'm opposed to company on a hot day; but some way having them was different. And then I didn't imagine she was so very used to cooking, and I got to thinking maybe a meal away from home would be a rest.