“Good gracious!” Martha cried; and she laughed and blushed. “Haven’t you just taken me to church? Aren’t you already taking me places, Harlan?” CHAPTER XXII MARTHA had said that Dan’s remaining away “didn’t hurt—not exactly”; and by this she meant to give Harlan the impression that she was less than hurt; but such a denial, thus qualified, means in truth more than hurt. She was a “big Western woman,” but she could be sensitive, and had her resentments and her smallnesses. Perhaps she was not quite genuinely sorry to believe that the old friend who neglected to bid her welcome home had begun to look almost middle-aged and seemed to have lost something fine that he had possessed in his youth. There were characteristic possessions of his that he had not lost, however; he had even acquired more of them, as she discovered one evening a few weeks after the Sunday noon when little Henry tore her dress. Mr. Shelby had come home from his office in a state of irritability, which he made audible even before he entered the house; and from her windows upstairs she heard him denouncing his old negro driver. There had been a thunderstorm earlier in the afternoon, but that was no excuse—“not a dog-gone _bit_ of excuse!” Mr. Shelby declared—for a carriage to be “all so sploshed-over with mud that a decent man’d be ashamed to get caught dead in it!” And he seemed to resent the fat old servitor’s wheezy explanation that the mud was the work of a malevolent motor-car. “Cain’t go nowhur them automob’les ain’ goin’ to git you these days! I had my carri’ge all spick-an’-span. Automob’le come zimmin’ by jes’ as we turn onto the avenoo. ‘Splickety-splick-splash!’ she say, an’ _zoosh!_ jes’ look at my nice clean carri’ge solid mud! No, suh, Mist’ Shelby; I had my carri’ge all wash up fresh. Nasty ole automob’le spoil ev’ything! No, suh, I——” “Gee-mun-nent-ly!” Martha heard her father exclaim. “What you tryin’ to do? _Talk_ me to death? I already heard enough talk in my office for one day, thank you! By Cripey, you stop that eternal gab o’ yours and get those horses into the barn and sponge their mouths out! Hear me?” He came into the house and could be heard muttering snappishly to himself on the stairway, as he ascended to his room to “wash his face and hands for dinner.” But at the table he proved that soap and water were ineffective, at least to remove bitterness from a face; and he found fault with everything. The most unbearable of his troubles finally appeared to be put upon him by the salt, which the humidity of the weather had affected. “I s’pose this is the way you keep house in Italy!” he said. “Nothin’ but smell and deggeredation over there anyway—they prob’ly don’t care whether they can get salt out o’ their saltcellars or not. But in this country, in a decent man’s house, he’d like to see at least one saltcellar on his table that’d _work_!”