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I am called hard names in no soft language, and advised to pray heaven for forgiveness for the harm I am doing by this ungodly book. To-morrow I receive a widower's letter, of twenty-six pages, rose-tinted and perfumed. He relates his personal history. He encloses the photographs of his dead wife, his living children, and himself.
"What else could you expect of a widower's family?" groaned the other ancient maiden. And then they both shook their heads. It was early on Saturday morning and the Merediths were out in the dew-drenched world with a delightful consciousness of the holiday. They had never had anything to do on a holiday.
Sunny, except for his difference of opinion with the soap, enjoyed no other mishap, and Bill's only transgression was to send one of the dippers, amidst a volley of curses, hurtling at the yellow pup, who at one time threatened to upset all Sandy's dignity, and incidentally the boiling water, by getting mixed up with that worthy widower's legs.
Sandy was the only one of the three apparently alive to the true exigencies of the case, and Sunny addressed himself more exclusively to him. "Say," he went on, his good-humored eyes smiling cunningly up into the widower's face, "I've heerd tell that you once did some pore unsuspicious female the dirty trick of marryin' her. Mebbe you'll sure hev' notions 'bout kiddies an' such things.
The widower's morning awakening was frightful above all things else-his awakening in the large bed that now had but one pillow. It was there that he had once had the exquisite pleasure of watching his dear Lucie every morning when asleep; for she did not like to get up early, and sometimes he had jokingly scolded her for it.
Once more the vivid pictures flash from the night of woe Helen in her fatal beauty stepping lightly to her doom, the widower's nights of mourning haunted by the ghost of love, the horrors of the war that followed, the slain abroad and the mourners at home, the change of living flesh and blood for the dust and ashes of the tomb.
I want to fathom the mystery of that midnight interment at Dewsdale; I want to know the story of that Mary Haygarth who lies under the old yew-tree at Spotswold, and for whose loss some one sorrowed without hope of consolation. Was that a widower's commonplace, I wonder, and did the unknown mourner console himself ultimately with a new wife?
It was pitiable to watch the good man as he sate with us. My wife, in her air and in many tones and gestures, constantly recalled her mother to the bereaved widower's heart. What cheer we could give him in his calamity we offered; but, especially, little Hetty was now, under Heaven, his chief support and consolation.
What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the widower's heart, Heaven knows! But he kept them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could have given pain to any human being. He only said on returning, "I knew, Christian, from the first, that you would be a good mother to my children."
Object: matrimony; that mostly is a widower's main object in life; and you can't show 'em nothing except when you bury 'em." "I'd die before I'd answer that sort of a thing!" said Mary Warren hotly. "You would," replied Annie. "I know that. I knew it all along. That's why I had to take it into my own hands." Again the cynical smile of Annie Squires, twenty-two.
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