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“Oh, I can understand,” asserted the young man. “Mrs. Dysart’s position is very natural. But I think you should tell her what Miss Brownell advises. There is no other woman near, and it will prove very uncomfortable for the young lady if your wife remains unfriendly toward her. You certainly don’t want to be unjust, Dysart.”

John shook his head dolorously over this extension of his moral obligations.

“No,” he declared valiantly; “I want to be square with everybody; but I don’t want to prejudice Emeline against the professor, and I’m afraid this would. You see, Emeline’s this way–well, I don’t know as I’d ought to say just how Emeline is, but you know she’s an awful good woman !”

John leaned forward and gave the last three words a slow funereal emphasis which threatened his companion’s gravity.

“Oh, I know,” Palmerston broke out quickly; “Mrs. Dysart’s a good woman, and she’s a very smart woman, too; she has good ideas.”

“Yes, yes; Emeline’s smart,” John made haste to acquiesce; “she’s smart as far as she knows, but when she don’t quite understand, then she’s prejudiced. I guess women are generally prejudiced about machinery; they can’t be expected to see into it: but still, if you think I’d ought to tell her what this Brownell girl says, why, I’m a-going to do it.”

John got up with the air of a man harassed but determined, and went out of the tent.

The next afternoon Mrs. Dysart put on her beaded dolman and her best bonnet and panted through the tar-weed to call upon her new neighbor. Palmerston watched the good woman’s departure, and awaited her return, taunting himself remorselessly meanwhile for the curiosity which prompted him to place a decoy-chair near his tent door, and exulting shamefacedly at the success of his ruse when she sank into it with the interrogative glance with which fat people always commit themselves to furniture.

“Well, I’ve been to see her, and I must say, for a girl that’s never found grace, she’s about the straightforwardest person I ever came across. I know I was prejudiced.” Mrs. Dysart took off her bonnet, a sacred edifice constructed of cotton velvet, frowzy feathers, and red glass currants, and gazed at it penitentially. “That father of hers is enough to prejudice a saint. But the girl ain’t to blame. I think she must have had a prayin’ mother, though she says she doesn’t remember anything about her exceptin’ her clothes, which does sound worldly.”

Mrs. Dysart straightened out the varnished muslin leaves of her horticultural headgear, and held the structure at arm’s length with a sigh of gratified sense and troubled spirit.

“I invited her to come to the mothers’ meetin’ down at Mrs. Stearns’s in the wash with me next Thursday afternoon, and I’m goin’ to have her over to dinner some day when the old perfessor’s off on a tramp. I try to have Christian grace, but I can’t quite go him, though I would like to see the girl brought into the fold.”

Palmerston remembered the steadfast eyes of the wanderer, and wondered how they had met all this. His companion replaced the bonnet on her head, where it lurched a little, by reason of insufficient skewering, as she got up.

“Then you were pleased with Miss Brownell?” the young man broke out, rather senselessly, he knew–aware, all at once, of a desire to hear more.

Mrs. Dysart did not sit down.

“Yes,” she said judicially; “for a girl without any bringin’ up, and with no religious inflooences, and no mother and no father to speak of, I think she’s full as good as some that’s had more chances. I’ve got to go and start a fire now,” she went on, with an air of willingness but inability to continue the subject. “There’s Jawn comin’ after the milk-pail; I do wish he could be brought to listen to reason.”

Palmerston watched the good woman as she labored down the path, her dusty skirts drawn close about her substantial ankles, and the beaded dolman glittering unfeelingly in the sun.