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Updated: May 13, 2025
Friends were what Hitty read of in the "Spectator," and longed to have; but she knew none of the Greenfield girls since she left school, and the only companion she had was Keery, rough as the east wind, but genuine and kind-hearted, better at counsel than consolation, and no way adapted to fill the vacant place in Hitty's heart. So the years wore away, and Miss Hyde's early beauty went with them.
Moreover, he was a man, which counted heavily against him. Since he had taken up his father's practice, he had heard a great deal about Miss Mehitable's view of marriage, and her determination to shield Araminta from such an unhappy fate. And Araminta had not been intended, by Dame Nature, for such shielding. Every line of her body, rounding into womanhood, defied Aunt Hitty's well-meant efforts.
Miss Hitty's lower jaw dropped, her strong, body shook. She gazed at Ralph as one might look at an intimate friend gone suddenly daft. She had heard of people who lost their reason without warning. Was it possible that she was in the room with a lunatic? She edged toward the door, keeping her eyes on Ralph. He anticipated her, and opened it with a polite flourish. "Remember," he warned her.
It was Hitty's conception of an emergency meal the kind of thing that her mother before her had prepared on wash-day when an unexpected relative alighted from the noon train, and surprised her into inadvertent hospitality. It began with steamed clams and melted butter sauce.
"I wish I could have had your father." "Father wasn't there," returned Ralph, secretly amused. "You had to take me." Miss Hitty's face softened. There were other reasons why she could not have had Ralph's father. "When can Minty go home?" "Minty can't go home until she's well. She's got to stay right here."
With them were served boiled potatoes in their jackets, no wash-day cook ever removed the peeling from an emergency potato, and afterward a course of Hitty's famous huckleberry dumplings, the lightest, most ephemeral balls of dumplings that were ever dipped into the blue-black deeps of hot huckleberry not blueberry, but country huckleberry sauce. "Where's the coffee?"
"Vexed in all its seaward course by bridges, dams, and mills," but finding time, during the busy summer months, to flush its fertile banks with beauty. "Gorry!" ejaculated Mr. Slocum, "ef I hain't left the widder Foss settin' on Aunt Hitty's hoss-block, 'n' I promised to pick her up when I come along back!
Hitty's unprecedented and taciturn donning of her best bonnet in the early morning hours, followed by her abrupt departure without explanation or apology, was also a little disconcerting to any one acquainted with her habits. Nancy was relieved to hear her key in the lock again, and put down her work to greet her. The door opened and Sheila stood on the threshold.
Dimock neither worked himself nor allowed a man on the premises, Keery took a heavy cold, and, worn out with a life of hard work, sank into rest quickly, her last act of life being to draw Hitty's face down to her own, wrinkled and wan as it was, scarce so old in expression as her mistress's, and with one long kiss and sob speak the foreboding and anxious farewell she could not utter.
Sometimes the unwakened heart within her dreamed, as a girl's heart will. Stately visions of Sir Charles Grandison bowing before her, shuddering fascinations over the image of that dreadful Lovelace, nothing more real haunted Hitty's imagination.
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