“I remember the suspicion with which Pennsylvania Dutch farmers and their wives would invariably regard me when, applying for a few days’ board, I would confess to being a married woman, not even a widow. Why, then, was I going about without my husband? This made it harder for me to obtain board than if I had been an old maid. ‘Where’s her husband, anyhow?’ the farmer and his wife would speculate. ‘Her out here alone fur three days yet and him not showin’ his face! It’s somepin awful funny!’ Then the wife would tell me how in twenty-five years of married life she had never yet spent a night away from her spouse. “One morning as I was sitting on the kitchen porch writing to my husband the farmer’s wife bent over my shoulder to read what I was writing. ‘Now that there writin’,’ she remarked, ‘I can’t read it so very good.’ I quickly laid the blotter over the page. ‘I am writing to my husband,’ I said hastily, ‘to let him know where I am.’ She stared at me. ‘He don’t know where you’re at?’ she gasped. ‘Well, I guess anyhow, then!’ Which, being interpreted, meant: ‘I should think it was about time!’” The following further account of these people is taken from a talk Joseph Gollomb had with Mrs. Martin while she was in New York to see the opening of Mrs. Fiske in _Erstwhile Susan_. The interview, printed in the New York _Evening Post_ of January 22, 1916, provoked Mr. Pennypacker’s blanket indictment which we have already recapitulated: “You can tell the Pennsylvania Dutchman by his speech, even after he sheds his queer clothes and barbering and takes on the guise of the average American,” explained Mrs. Martin. “A bellboy in Allentown once disarmed my wrath with, ‘Was you bellin’ for me? I didn’t hear it make.’ I knew him then as coming from my people. His father probably would say, cocking his weather eye, ‘It looks for rain. I’m sure it’s going to make something down.’ Or his mother, pricing at market, would ask, ‘For what do you sell your chickens at? I want to wonder. I feel for getting that fat one.’ Your washerwoman, with all the deference in the world, will refer to your husband and hers: ‘Does your Charlie like his shirt ironed? My mister don’t.’ “Enter Cashtown, Virginsville, or Bird-In-The-Hand (these are actual towns). You’ll see houses painted flagrant red or yellow or pink; flower gardens gorgeous with color. And there all the display, or even trace of love of physical beauty, stops. The homes are immaculate but ugly. The parlor is furnished at marriage, then shut up for years.