“If you say you can’t afford a hired girl
when Mattie goes.”
Frome turned away again, and taking up his razor stooped
to catch the reflection of his stretched cheek in
the blotched looking-glass above the wash-stand.
“Why on earth should Mattie go?”
“Well, when she gets married, I mean,”
his wife’s drawl came from behind him.
“Oh, she’d never leave us as long as you
needed her,” he returned, scraping hard at his
chin.
“I wouldn’t ever have it said that I stood
in the way of a poor girl like Mattie marrying a smart
fellow like Denis Eady,” Zeena answered in a
tone of plaintive self-effacement.
Ethan, glaring at his face in the glass, threw his
head back to draw the razor from ear to chin.
His hand was steady, but the attitude was an excuse
for not making an immediate reply.
“And the doctor don’t want I should be
left without anybody,” Zeena continued.
“He wanted I should speak to you about a girl
he’s heard about, that might come-”
Ethan laid down the razor and straightened himself
with a laugh.
“Denis Eady! If that’s all, I guess
there’s no such hurry to look round for a girl.”
“Well, I’d like to talk to you about it,”
said Zeena obstinately.
He was getting into his clothes in fumbling haste.
“All right. But I haven’t got the
time now; I’m late as it is,” he returned,
holding his old silver turnip-watch to the candle.
Zeena, apparently accepting this as final, lay watching
him in silence while he pulled his suspenders over
his shoulders and jerked his arms into his coat; but
as he went toward the door she said, suddenly and
incisively: “I guess you’re always
late, now you shave every morning.”
That thrust had frightened him more than any vague
insinuations about Denis Eady. It was a fact
that since Mattie Silver’s coming he had taken
to shaving every day; but his wife always seemed to
be asleep when he left her side in the winter darkness,
and he had stupidly assumed that she would not notice
any change in his appearance. Once or twice in
the past he had been faintly disquieted by Zenobia’s
way of letting things happen without seeming to remark
them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase,
revealing that she had all along taken her notes and
drawn her inferences. Of late, however, there
had been no room in his thoughts for such vague apprehensions.
Zeena herself, from an oppressive reality, had faded
into an insubstantial shade. All his life was
lived in the sight and sound of Mattie Silver, and
he could no longer conceive of its being otherwise.
But now, as he stood outside the church, and saw Mattie
spinning down the floor with Denis Eady, a throng of
disregarded hints and menaces wove their cloud about
his brain....
As the dancers poured out of the hall Frome, drawing
back behind the projecting storm-door, watched the
segregation of the grotesquely muffled groups, in
which a moving lantern ray now and then lit up a face
flushed with food and dancing. The villagers,
being afoot, were the first to climb the slope to
the main street, while the country neighbours packed
themselves more slowly into the sleighs under the
shed.
