“We’ve just moved in, and we haven’t
furnished all the rooms yet,” she said
of two empty ones which Bartley perversely flung open.
“And I don’t know that we shall.
The house is much too big for us; but we thought we’d
better take it,” he added, as if it were a castle
for vastness.
Halleck and Atherton were silent for some moments
after they came away, and then, “I don’t
believe he whips her,” suggested the latter.
“No, I guess he’s fond of her,”
said Halleck, gravely.
“Did you see how careful he was of her, coming
up and down stairs? That was very pretty; and
it was pretty to see them both so ready to show off
their young housekeeping to us.”
“Yes, it improves a man to get married,”
said Halleck, with a long, stifled sigh. “It’s
improved the most selfish hound I ever knew.”
The two elder Miss Hallecks were so much older than
Olive, the youngest, that they seemed to be of a sort
of intermediary generation between her and her parents,
though Olive herself was well out of her teens, and
was the senior of her brother Ben by two or three
years. The elder sisters were always together,
and they adhered in common to the religion of their
father and mother. The defection of their brother
was passive, but Olive, having conscientiously adopted
an alien faith, was not a person to let others imagine
her ashamed of it, and her Unitarianism was outspoken.
In her turn she formed a kind of party with Ben inside
the family, and would have led him on in her own excesses
of independence if his somewhat melancholy indifferentism
had consented. It was only in his absence that
she had been with her sisters during their summer
sojourn in the White Mountains; when they returned
home, she vigorously went her way, and left them to
go theirs. She was fond of them in her defiant
fashion; but in such a matter as calling on Mrs. Hubbard
she chose not to be mixed up with her family, or in
any way to countenance her family’s prepossessions.
Her sisters paid their visit together, and she waited
for Clara Kingsbury to come up from the seaside.
Then she went with her to call upon Marcia, sitting
observant and non-committal while Clara swooped through
the little house, up stairs and down, clamoring over
its prettiness, and admiring the art with which so
few dollars could be made to go so far. “Think
of finding such a bower on Clover Street!” She
made Marcia give her the cost of everything; and her
heart swelled with pride in her sex—when
she heard that Marcia had put down all the carpets
herself. “I wanted to make them up,”
Marcia explained, “but Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t
let me,—it cost so little at the store.”
“Wouldn’t let you!” cried Miss Kingsbury.
“I should hope as much, indeed! Why, my
child, you’re a Roman matron!”
She came away in agony lest Marcia might think she
meant her nose. She drove early the next morning
to tell Olive Halleck that she had spent a sleepless
night from this cause, and to ask her what she should
do. “Do you think she will be hurt, Olive?
Tell me what led up to it. How did I behave before
that? The context is everything in such cases.”
