Country Neighbors

								

to think about. Blankness had seized upon her, not because he had
married a woman before her, but because he had not told. Possibly he had
told her mother in some of their desultory talks and had forgotten to
say more. The chill wonder of it sprang from her learning it too late.
She had to adapt herself to a new man. Until now she had believed that
it was spring with them, and that he had waited for her with an
involuntary fealty, as she had done for him. They had every guerdon of
young love, except that there were not so many years before them. But
even that paled beside the triumphant sense that no boy or girl could
possibly be as happy as they, with their ripened patience and sense of
fun. A phrase came into her mind as she lay there against his heart and
knew he was driving slowly to let her rest: "the wife of his youth." It
hurt her keenly, and she caught a breath so sharp and sudden that he
drew her closer, as one stirs a child to let it fall into an easier
pose.
That day they stopped at an old-fashioned tavern in a drowsy town, and
Lydia, after dinner, where she talked quite gayly about the house and
the garden and the farther hills, said she thought she would go upstairs
and lie down a spell. Eben looked at her with concern. She was always as
ready as he for "poking about" new places.
"Ain't you feelin' well?" he asked her.
"Oh, yes," said Lydia, "I'm all right. Only I'm kinder sleepy. I guess
this air makes me. It's higher up here than 'tis a few miles back."
"Yes," said Eben, "we've been kinder climbin' up for some days. Well,
you go an' sleep it off. Do you good. I'll have my pipe, an' then I'll
mog round an' see 'f I can't work off a few bottles on the unsuspectin'
populace."
When Eben came home from his successful sales, he found a changeling.
His wife was not so different in looks or words as in a subtle something
he could not define. She laughed at his jokes, and even, in a gentle
way, ventured pleasantries of her own; but a strange languor hung about
her. It might have been called patience, an acceptance of a situation
rather than her eager cheer in it.
"You tired?" he asked her over and over again that day, and she always
answered:--
"Mebbe I am, a mite."
So they settled down in the little tavern, and while Eben took
excursions round about to place his "trade," she stayed behind, and
either shut herself upstairs or sat meditatively in the garden. What
moved her now was an overwhelming curiosity. She wondered what the first
wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if
she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to
tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy
couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to
quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in
his helplessness, used to go through his pockets.
"Anybody can bear 'most anything," he used to declare, as he steadied