New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Meantime, the tramp fell into all the usages of life indoors; and
without, he worked revolution. He took his natural place at the head of
affairs, and Amelia stood by, rejoicing. Her besetting error of doing
things at the wrong moment had disarranged great combinations as well
as small. Her impetuosity was constantly misleading her, bidding her
try, this one time, whether harvest might not follow faster on the
steps of spring. Enoch's mind was of another cast. For him, tradition
reigned, and law was ever laying out the way. Some months after their
marriage, Amelia had urged him to take away the winter banking about
the house, for no reason save that the Mardens clung to theirs; but he
only replied that he'd known of cold snaps way on into May, and he
guessed there was no particular hurry. The very next day brought a
bitter air, laden with sleet, and Amelia, shivering at the open door,
exulted in her feminine soul at finding him triumphant on his own
ground. Enoch seemed, as usual, unconscious of victory. His immobility
had no personal flavor. He merely acted from an inevitable devotion to
the laws of life; and however often they might prove him right, he
never seemed to reason that Amelia was consequently wrong. Perhaps that
was what made it so pleasant to live with him.
It was "easy sleddin'" now. Amelia grew very young. Her cheeks gained a
bloom, her eyes brightened. She even, as the matrons noticed, took to
crimping her hair. They looked on with a pitying awe. It seemed a
fearsome thing, to do so much for a tramp who would only kill you in
the end. Amelia stepped deftly about the house. She was a large woman,
whose ways had been devoid of grace; but now the richness of her
spiritual condition informed her with a charm. She crooned a little
about her work. Singing voice she had none, but she grew into a way of
putting words together, sometimes a line from the psalms, sometimes a
name she loved, and chanting the sounds, in unrecorded melody.
Meanwhile, little Rosie, always irreproachably dressed, with a jealous
care lest she fall below the popular standard, roamed in and out of the
house, and lightened its dull intervals. She, like the others, grew at
once very happy, because, like them, she accepted her place without a
qualm, as if it had been hers from the beginning. They were simple
natures, and when their joy came, they knew how to meet it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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