City and town life -- Fiction; Romance fiction, American; Short stories, American
"Miggy?" I said with interest--and found myself nodding to this new
relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with
the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great
people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any
amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it
beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?
"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come
here."
Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,
"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.
Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while
she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin
tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and
drooped.
"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and
laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and
especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the
other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me
with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.
"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in
the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round.
_Now_ almost more than at night. Well--I don't know; both times."
I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting
vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know
what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.
"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter.
Want a pink?"
Thus tacitly excused--how true her instinct was, courteously to put the
three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!--I have come
back to my house and my own breakfast.
"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the
country?"
My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.
"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened
into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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