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Updated: May 31, 2025
And so they were married, and went to the thriving city of Indianapolis to live, and Hannah Winter was so busy with her new household goods, and the linens, and the wine-coloured silk and its less magnificent satellites, that it was almost a fortnight before she realized fully that this solid young man, Hermie Slocum, was not only solid but immovable; not merely thrifty, but stingy; not alone taciturn but quite conversationless.
Marcia was a throw-back to her grandmother Winter quick-tongued, restless, volatile. The boy was an admirable mixture of the best qualities of his father and mother; slow-going, like Hermie Slocum, but arriving surely at his goal, like his mother. With something of her driving force mixed with anything his father had of gentleness. A fine boy, and uninteresting.
"I suppose we lived too well," Hannah said when her old friends expressed concern at her plight. "Hermie was too generous. But I don't mind working. It keeps me young." And so, truly, it did. She sold not only insurance but coal, a thing which rather shocked her south side friends. She took orders for tons of this and tons of that, making a neat commission thereby.
It ain't like I was the kind of a girl with another man in the case " "We should thank her, Hermie, that there ain't more scandal mixed up in it yet!" "Ma!" "My poor boy, what could have had his pick from the first girls in St. "Ma!" There was an edge to Mr. Loeb's voice that had the bite of steel.
He would push back his chair, clear his throat, and then he would be gone. "Myron!" she said. She spoke as something within Myron remembered the school-teacher speaking, when she called him to the board. The something within him responded to it, and without knowing why, he straightened and looked attentive. "You noticed Hermie, didn't you?" she adjured him.
"Disparity of means " began my father. "Oh, no matter," interrupted Mrs. Leare: "her father always told her just to please herself. Mr. Farquhar is an Englishman and of good family. He has his profession to keep him out of mischief, and Hermie will more than pay her own expenses.
But she judged it best, in the interest of domestic government, to quell emotion that could have, she knew, no hopeful issue, and she began breaking eggs into her mixing bowl and then beating them with a brisk hand. "Father never was one to talk over his business with anybody, even the nearest," she rejoined. "You know that, Hermie. We've got to take folks as we find 'em.
Hannah Winter had her job cut out for her and she finished it well, and alone. No reproaches. Little complaint. Criticism she made in plenty, being the daughter of a voluble mother; and she never gave up hope of stiffening the spine of the invertebrate Hermie. The ten thousand went in driblets. There never was anything dashing or romantic about Hermie Slocum's failures.
"What'll you have, girls?" "Anchovies and fine-chopped onions for mine. Tell 'em in the kitchen, waiter, I said fine, and if the gentlemen are going to order wine, bring me a plate of oyster crackers first to take off the edge of my emptiness." "Sure, another bottle of wine, waiter." "Hermie, we " "And you, little Jingle Bells, same as Blondey's order?" "Yeh." "Say, you know what?" "No. What?"
She was resolved not to go to her people for help. And it seemed inevitable if Hermie did not heed her. She saw that he was unsuited for business of the mercantile sort; urged him to take up the selling of insurance, just then getting such a strong and wide hold on the country. In the end he did take it up, and would have made a failure of that, too, if it had not been for Hannah.
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