"I think -- I think," said Agatha, "that Nancy Ellen has much upon
which to congratulate herself. More education would not injure
her, but she has enough that if she will allow her ambition to
rule her and study in private and spend her spare time communing
with the best writers, she can make an exceedingly fair
intellectual showing, while she surely is a handsome woman. With
a good home and such a fine young professional man as she has had
the good fortune to attract, she should immediately put herself at
the head of society in Hartley and become its leader to a much
higher moral and intellectual plane than it now occupies."
"Bet she has a good time," said young Adam. "He's awful nice."
"Son," said Agatha, "'awful,' means full of awe. A cyclone, a
cloudburst, a great conflagration are awful things. By no stretch
of the imagination could they be called nice."
"But, Ma, if a cyclone blew away your worst enemy wouldn't it be
nice?"
Adam, Jr., and Kate laughed. Not the trace of a smile crossed
Agatha's pale face.
"The words do not belong in contiguity," she said. "They are
diametrically opposite in meaning. Please do not allow my ears to
be offended by hearing you place them in propinquity again."
"I'll try not to, Ma," said young Adam; then Agatha smiled on him
approvingly. "When did you meet Mr. Gray, Katherine?" she asked.
"On the foot-log crossing the creek beside Lang's line fence.
Near the spot Nancy Ellen first met him I imagine."
"How did you recognize him?"
"Nancy Ellen had just been showing me his picture and telling me
about him. Great Day, but she's in love with him!"
"And so he is with her, if Lang's conclusions from his behaviour
can be depended upon. They inform me that he can be induced to
converse on no other subject. The whole arrangement appeals to me
as distinctly admirable."
"And you should see the lilac bush and the cabbage roses," said
Kate. "And the strangest thing is Father. He is peaceable as a
lamb. She is not to teach, but to spend the winter sewing on her
clothes and bedding, and Father told her he would give her the
necessary money. She said so. And I suspect he will. He always
favoured her because she was so pretty, and she can come closer to
wheedling him than any of the rest of us excepting you, Agatha."
"It is an innovation, surely!"
"Mother is nearly as bad. Father furnishing money for clothes and
painting the barn is no more remarkable than Mother letting her
turn the house inside out. If it had been I, Father would have
told me to teach my school this winter, buy my own clothes and
linen with the money I had earned, and do my sewing next summer.
But I am not jealous. It is because she is handsome, and the man
fine-looking and with such good prospects."