American fiction -- 20th century; Country life -- Fiction
"I've felt it for quite a long spell," said his wife earnestly. "I
don't know but I've always felt it--leastways, all through my married
life. It's somethin' that makes me as mad as tophet when you start me
out to do anything I don't feel it's no ways right to do, and it keeps
whisperin' to me I'm a fool to do it. That's what it says, Myron.
'You're a fool to do it!'"
Myron was touched at last, through his armor of esteem.
"I ain't asked you to do what ain't right, Caddie," he asseverated.
"What makes you tell me I have?"
"That's what it says to me," she repeated fixedly. "'You're a fool to do
it.' That's what it says. It's my double personality."
It seemed best to Myron to humor this inexplicable mood, until he could
persuade her back into a normal one.
"That wa'n't the way I understood it," he told her, "when I read the
piece. The folks that were afflicted seemed like different folks. Now,
you ain't any different, rain or shine. You're as even as anybody I
should wish to see. That's what I've liked about ye, Caddie."
The softness of the implication she swept aside, as if she hardly dared
regard it lest it weaken her resolve.
"Oh, I ain't goin' to be the same, day in, day out," she declared
eagerly. "I feel I ain't, Myron. It's gettin' the best of me, the other
creatur' that wants to have its own way. It's been growin' and growin',
same as a child grows up, and now it's goin' to take its course. Same 's
Hermie's growed up, you know. He's old enough to have his way, and lead
his life same's we've led ours, and we've got to stand one side and let
him do it."
Her husband gave her a sharp, sudden glance, and then fell again to the
contemplation of his knotted brown hands that seemed, like all his
equipment, informed with specialized power.
"Well," he said at length, "I guess you need a kind of a change. You'll
feel better when you get over to t'other house. There's a different
outlook over there, and you'll have more to take up your mind."
She answered instantly, in the haste that dares not wait upon
reflection. Her eyes were brighter now, and her hands worked nervously.
"Oh, I ain't goin' to move, Myron. I might as well tell you that now.
I'm goin' to stay right here where I be. I don't feel able to help it.
That's my double personality. It won't let me."
Her husband was looking at her now in what seemed to her a very
threatening way. His shaggy eyebrows were drawn together and his eyes
had lightning in them. She continued staring at him, held by the
fascination of her terror. In that instant she realized a great many
things: chiefly that she had never seen her husband angry with her,
because she had taken every path to avoid the possibility, and that it
was even more sickening than she could have thought. But she knew also
that the battle was on, and suddenly, for no reason she could formulate,
she remembered one of her own fighting ancestors who was said to have
died hard in the Revolution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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