Husband and wife -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
In the meantime she had accomplished the most ambitious part of the
whole enterprise. She had bought a horse. She owned Donahue.
Back in her not distant school days Augusta had known Mary Donahue.
Old Greenwich village, which nowadays harbors its thousands of
intellectual gypsies and free riders of every shade and hobby, used
to, and does still, furnish a winter home for a circle--they were not
a tribe--of Irish gypsies. They did not form a community, nor did they
travel the country in caravans. Each family went out by itself in the
spring, through the northern part of the state, sold its own laces,
told its own fortunes, swapped its own horses. But by what seemed an
unspoken agreement they all returned late in the fall to the same
neighborhood. With the instinct for places, which is strong in even the
most unreliable of migratory birds, they came to refuge in the rickety
jumbles of houses between Washington Square and West Fourteenth street,
where one street blunders into another, and gets nowhere, and turns
back, until, in desperation, West Fourth street crosses West Twelfth
street and ties the whole business up in a knot.
Patrick Sarsfield Donahue was one of these gypsies, coming honestly
and anciently into his way of living and having no intention of
leaving it for any other. But Mary Donahue, his daughter, was untrue
to the traditions of her kind in that she had insisted on going to
school every day of the time they were in New York. Augusta had been
interested in her. Augusta _would_ be.
Now Augusta went down across Fourteenth street to find Mary Donahue. If
Mary Donahue could, and she did, manage, cook for, boss and generally
hold together on the road, an enterprise that consisted of a father,
six horses--more or less according to the balance of trade, four
growing sisters, two wagons, two small healthy brothers, and uncounted,
and wholly unaccountable, dogs; if Mary Donahue could manage this, and
drive a team of horses, then Augusta could drive one horse and keep
Jimmie out in the air and free from worry until he should be cured.
The idea was so simple and so much to her own liking that Augusta was
almost ashamed to think of the fun she was going to have with it. And
she hugged it jealously to herself so that Jimmie should not know until
the wagon was at the door for him.
She knew how he would loathe and fret at the thought of going to any
sort of a sanitarium or a resort. And she had a terrible dread that
her money would not be enough for that. Now this way, once the horse
and wagon were paid for, they would not need any money except for the
things they actually ate, they and the horse. She was necessarily a
little vague about the latter item. But Mary Donahue could give her the
facts as an expert.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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