interest in food herself, and she hated to prepare it. She liked nothing
better than to have Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days—he often
went chiefly because he was hungry—and to be left alone to eat canned
salmon and to keep the house shut up from morning until night.
Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said, “they ate too
much and broke too much”; she even said they knew too much. She used
what mind she had in devising shifts to minimize her housework. She used
to tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would be no
housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married, she had been always in a
panic for fear she would have children. Now that her apprehensions on
that score had grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it. If dust did
not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said. She would take any
amount of trouble to avoid trouble. Why, nobody knew. Certainly her
husband had never been able to make her out. Such little, mean natures
are among the darkest and most baffling of created things. There is no
law by which they can be explained. The ordinary incentives of pain and
pleasure do not account for their behavior. They live like insects,
absorbed in petty activities that seem to have nothing to do with any
genial aspect of human life.
Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, “liked to gad.” She liked to have
her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and to be out of it—anywhere. A
church social, a prayer meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no
preference. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit for hours
in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion store, listening to the talk of
the women who came in, watching them while they tried on hats, blinking
at them from her corner with her sharp, restless little eyes. She never
talked much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and she had
a sharp ear for racy anecdotes—“traveling men’s stories,” they used to
be called in Moonstone. Her clicking laugh sounded like a typewriting
machine in action, and, for very pointed stories, she had a little
screech.
Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years, and when she was
Belle White she was one of the “pretty” girls in Lansing, Michigan. She
had then a train of suitors. She could truly remind Archie that “the
boys hung around her.” They did. They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, “Oh, that Belle White, she’s a case!” She used to play
heavy practical jokes which the young men thought very clever. Archie
was considered the most promising young man in “the young crowd,” so
Belle selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware, that she had
selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who could not withstand
such enlightenment. Belle’s family were sorry for him. On his wedding
day her sisters looked at the big, handsome boy—he was twenty-four—as
he walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked at each
other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face, his gentle,
protecting arm, made them uncomfortable. Well, they were glad that he
was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they would not be
onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off
their hands.
