FullReads

“I guess I ain’t called on to put myself out,” she said, simply, yet not irreverently. “Father had his way in pretty much everything while he was alive. I always made up my mind if I should outlive him, I’d have all the things I wanted then, when young folks want the most. And you know then I couldn’t get ’em.”

“Well!” said Mrs. Wilson. Her tone spoke volumes of conflicting commentary.

“You got a saddle?” asked Lucindy, turning to her cousin. “I thought I remembered you had one laid away, up attic. I suppose you’d just as soon I’d take it?”

He was neither shocked nor amused. He had been looking at her very sadly, as one who read in every word the entire tragedy of a repressed and lonely life.

“Yes, we have, Lucindy,” he said, gently, quieting his wife by a motion of the hand, “but ’tain’t what you think. It’s a man’s saddle. You’d have to set straddle.

“Oh!” said Lucindy, a faint shade of disappointment clouding her face. “Well, no matter! I guess they’ve got one down to the Mardens’. Jane, should you just as soon come round this afternoon, and look over some bunnit trimmin’s with me? I took two kinds of flowers home from Miss West’s, and I can’t for my life tell which to have.”

“Ain’t you goin’ to wear black?” Mrs. Wilson spoke now in double italics.

“Oh, no! I don’t feel called on to do that. I always liked bright colors, and I don’t know’s ‘twould be real honest in me to put on mournin’ when I didn’t feel it.”

“‘Honor thy father’–” began Jane, in spite of her husband’s warning hand; but Lucindy interrupted her, with some perplexity.

“I have, Jane, I have! I honored father all my life, just as much as ever I could. I done everything he ever told me, little and big! No, though, there’s one thing I never fell in with. I did cheat him once. I don’t know but I’m sorry for that, now it’s all past and gone!”

Her cousin had been drumming absently on the window-sill, but he looked up with awakened interest. Mrs. Wilson, too, felt a wholesale curiosity, and she, at least, saw no reason for curbing it.

“What was it, Lucindy?” she asked. “The old hunks!” she repeated to herself, like an anathema.

Lucindy began her confession, with eyes down-dropped and a faltering voice.

“Father wanted I should have my hair done up tight and firm. So I pretended I done the best I could with it. I told him these curls round my face and down in my neck was too short, and I couldn’t pin ’em up. But they wa’n’t curls, and they wouldn’t ha’ been short if I hadn’t cut ’em. For every night, and sometimes twice a day, I curled ’em on a pipe-stem.”

“Ain’t them curls nat’ral, Lucindy?” cried Mrs. Wilson. “Have you been fixin’ ’em to blow round your face that way, all these years?”

“I begun when I was a little girl,” said Lucindy, guiltily. “It did seem kind o’ wrong, but I took real pleasure in it!”

Lothrop could bear no more. He wanted to wipe his eyes, but he chose instead to walk straight out of the room and down to his shop. His wife could only express a part of her amazement by demanding, in a futile sort of way,–

“Where’d you get the pipe?”

“I stole the first one from a hired man we had,” said Lucindy, her cheeks growing pink. “Sometimes I had to use slate-pencils.”

There was no one else to administer judgment, and Mrs. Wilson felt the necessity.

“Well,” she began, “an’ you can set there, tellin’ that an’ smilin’–“

“My smilin’ don’t mean any more’n some other folks’ cryin’, I guess,” said Lucindy, smiling still more broadly. “I begun that more’n thirty years ago. I looked into the glass one day, and I see the corners of my mouth were goin’ down. Sharper ‘n, vinegar, I was! So I says to myself, ‘I can smile, whether or no. Nobody can’t help that!’ And I did, and now I guess I don’t know when I do it.”