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Updated: June 24, 2025
Amarita made a picture of childlike misery. Her eyes had the piteous look of coming tears, and she swallowed once or twice before speech was possible. "O Elihu," she breathed, "you don't really s'pose that, do you?" "Course he will," said Elihu. "That's the way they do come drivin' along a time o' day when there's no menfolks to home, and take in the womenfolks.
Dill was a feminine creature, charged to the full with the love of service and unerring intuition as to the manner of it, and she did love to "see menfolks comfortable." "Don't you want I should pull your boots off?" This she said unwillingly, because she was about to break the current of his peace, and it seemed deceitful to offer him an alleviation that would do him no good after all.
The talks had been mostly cheerful, for the cap'n would have it so, and whenever she felt poorly she had taken pains to put on a lively front, because she reasoned that menfolks hated squally weather.
I'm sixty years old," she went on with a little break in her harsh voice, dominating him now by woman's logic, "an' I've never had a day to my-self, not even Fourth o' July. If I've went a-visitin' 'r to a picnic, I've had to come home an' milk 'n' get supper for you menfolks. I ain't been away t' stay overnight for thirteen years in this house, 'n' it was just so in Davis County for ten more.
She was devoted to her son, and more or less overshadowed by his prerogative as "menfolks" born to absorb the cream of things; but the elderly good sense in her was alive to the certainty that if Amarita had not been so yielding, Elihu would never have been so bumptious.
Sallie endeavored to maintain a discreet silence, but the effort proved too much for her. "Well, if you ask me, you're just as well off! The menfolks may be all right, but that Mrs. Halstead wouldn't have let you call your soul your own; wanted me to put ice-bags on you and all manner of outlandish things, and told me to my face that my house wasn't sanitary! I soon sent her about her business.
"The widow Pingree, from over Sharon way, she's so wasteful, I declare it makes my blood run cold to see her cuttin' and slashin' into good cloth; and Emerline Johnson she's so scantin', the menfolks all looks like scarecrows, with their legs and arms a-stickin' out. Mirandy's got faculty."
And all through the years, in trouble and in happiness, her plaint was the same "If I'd thought I was going to stick down on a farm all my life, slavin' for a pack of menfolks day and night, I'd rather have died. Might as well be dead as rottin' here." Her schoolteacher English had early reverted. Her speech was as slovenly as her dress.
If I had such a head as that, I'd cut it off! An' all the time 'Mandy did act like the very Old Nick, jest as any old maid would that hadn't set her mind on menfolks till she was thirty-five. She bought a red-plaid bow an' pinned it on in front, an' one day I ketched her at the lookin'-glass pullin' out a gray hair. That's why you ain't no grayer, I s'pose.
"Were they though?" said Tom. "Ay, they were, my lads; and what I wanted to say was this If so be as those fish could live in that bit of a three-acre pool without people knowing of their being there, don't you think there can be no end of big fishes and things in the great waters, thousands of miles from shore, such as menfolks has never seen?"
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