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"He could telegraph to Miss Arethusa," Lucinda suggested. The suggestion bespoke the superior moral quality of Lucinda’s make-up—her own feeling toward Arethusa being considered. "I don’t want her," said Aunt Mary with a positiveness that was final. "I don’t want her. My heavens, Lucinda, ain’t we just had enough of her? Anyhow, if you ain’t, I have.
"She wants it now." "She’s goin’ to the city all alone!’ Lucinda’s voice suddenly proclaimed behind him." "Then she’ll get it now," said Joshua.
The owner of the name started—but answered immediately: "Yes, Aunt Mary." "When I die I want to be buried from a roof garden! Don’t you forget! You’d better go an’ write it down. Go now—go this minute!" Arethusa shook as if with the discharge of a contiguous field battery. She had not had Lucinda’s gradual breaking-in to her aunt’s new trains of thought. "Aunt Mary," she said feebly at last.
Stebbins threw himself into the affair with all the tact and ardor of an experienced legal mind and soon after Lucinda’s return to her home allowed Arethusa to follow suit, the hopeful younger brother of the latter became a candidate for his second outfit of new sweaters and hat bands that year. Aunt Mary wrote him a letter upon the occasion of his new start in life, Mr.
Then the invalid sat up a little and showed some mercy on her servant’s very evident fright. "I want the calf shod," she explained, "so’s Joshua can run up an’ down the porch with him." So far from ameliorating Lucinda’s condition, this explanation rendered it visibly worse.
From his room he could hear the little faint sounds below stairs, that told of her final preparations for Lucinda’s morning eye, and he rested quiet until all else was quiet and then leaned back upon the chair’s hind legs and, tipping slowly to and fro in that position, tried to see just what he had better do the first thing on the following day.
Lucinda had been, comparatively speaking, young when she had come to wait upon the pleasure of the Watkins millions, and her waiting had been so pertinent and so patient that it had endured over a quarter of a century. Aunt Mary had been under fifty in the hour of Lucinda’s dawn; she was over seventy now.
She went slowly away to find Joshua and found him in the farther end of the rear woodhouse—John Watkins, like several of his ilk, having marked each forward step in the world by a back extension of his house. Joshua was chopping wood; his ax was high in the air. He also was calm and unsuspecting. "She’s goin’ to the city all alone!" Lucinda’s voice suddenly proclaimed behind him. The ax fell.
The packing of the trunk was a task which fell to Lucinda’s lot and was performed under the eagle eye of her mistress. Aunt Mary’s ideas of what she would require were delightfully unsophisticated and brought up short on the farther-side of her tooth brush and her rubbers. Nevertheless she agreed in Lucinda’s suggestions as to more extensive supplies.
Whatever could have made the boy get up and go downtown at three in the morning, anyway?" she said. "Seems kind of queer, don’t you think, Arethusa? Do you suppose he was ill and huntin’ for a drug store?" Arethusa had been sent for the second day previous because Lucinda’s youngest sister’s youngest child had come down with scarlet fever, and the family wanted Lucinda to enliven the quarantine.
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