“Poor thing!” (Mrs. Prouty had acquired the full, solicitous intonation of the parish visitor.) “She has many burdens to bear. Mr. Prouty often says that in these days it is wonderful to see a woman so devoted to her duty as a homemaker. She simply gives up her whole life to her family! Absolutely!”
“The children are such delicate little things, too, a constant care.” Mrs. Merritt snatched the opportunity to display her inside information. “There’s hardly a week that Doctor isn’t called in there for one or another of them. He often tells me that he doesn’t know what to do for them. They don’t seem to have anything to do with! No digestions, no constitutions. Just like their father. All but little Stephen. He’s strong enough!”
“He’s a perfect imp of darkness!” cried old Mrs. Anderson, lifting her thin gray face from her sewing. “I’ve raised a lot of children in my day and seen a lot more, but I never saw such a naughty contrary child as he is in all my born days. Nor so hateful! He never does anything unless it’s to plague somebody by it. The other day, in the last thaw it was, I’d just got my back porch mopped up after the grocer’s boy—you know how he tracks mud in—and I heard somebody fussing around out there, and I opened the door quick, and there was Stephen Knapp lugging over a great pail of mud to dump it on my porch. He’d dumped one already and got it all spread out on the boards. I said, ‘Why, Stephen Knapp, what makes you do such a bad thing?’ I was really paralyzed to see him at it. ‘What makes you be so bad, Stephen?’ I said. And he said—he’s got the hardest, coolest way of saying those wicked things—he said, as cool as you please, ‘ ’Tause I hate you, Mis’ Anderson, ’tause I hate you.’ And gave me that black look of his. …”
Through the tepid, stagnant air of the room flickered a sulphurous zigzag of passion. The women shrank back from it, horrified and fascinated.
“Mr. Prouty says,” quoted his wife, “that Stephen Knapp makes him think of the old Bible stories about people possessed of the devil. His mother is at her wit’s end. Mr. Prouty says she has asked him to help her with prayer. And Stephen gets worse all the time. And yet she’s always perfectly firm with him, never spoils him. And it’s wonderful, her iron self-control when he is in one of his tempers. I never could keep my temper like that. It can’t be due to anything about the way she manages him, for she never had a particle of trouble with the other two. Well, it’ll be a great relief to her, as she often says, when he goes to school with the others.”
Mrs. Merritt now said, lowering her voice, “You know she has a chronic skin trouble too that she never says anything about.”
“Like St. Paul, Mr. Prouty says.”
“Doctor has tried everything to cure it. Diet. Electricity. X-rays. All the salves in the drugstores. Oh, no,” she explained hastily in answer to an unspoken thought somewhere in the room. “Oh, no, it’s nothing horrid! Her husband is a nice enough man, as far as that goes. Doctor thinks it may be nervous, may be due to. …”
“Nervous!” cried Mrs. Mattie Farnham. “Why, it’s a real eruption, discharging pus and everything. I had to help her dress a place on her back once when Stephen was a tiny baby. Nervous!”
“Oh, Doctor doesn’t mean it is anything she could help. He often says that just because you’ve called a thing nervous is no reason for thinking it’s not serious. It’s as real to them, he says, as a broken leg.”
“Well, I’d have something worse than eczema if I had three delicate children to bring up and only that broken reed of a Lester Knapp to lean on,” said Mrs. Prouty with energy. “They tell me that he all but lost his job in the shakeup at Willing’s—let alone not getting advanced. Young Mrs. Willing told Mr. Prouty that her husband told her that he’d be blessed if he knew anything Lester Knapp would be good for—unless teaching poetry, maybe. Young Mrs. Willing is a Churchwoman, you know. It’s only her husband who is a Presbyterian. That’s how she happened to be talking to Mr. Prouty. She was telling him that if it depended on her which church. …”
“He’s a nice man, Lester Knapp is,” broke in Mrs. Farnham stoutly. “You know we’re sort of related. His sister married my husband’s brother. The children call me Aunt. When you come to know Lester he’s a real nice man. And he’s a smart man too, in his way. When he was at the State University he was considered one of the best students there, I’ve always heard ’em say. If he hadn’t married so young, he was lotting on being. …” Her tone changed suddenly—“Oh, Mrs. Merritt, do you think I ought to hem this or face it?”
“It’d be pretty bungling to hem, wouldn’t it?” Mrs. Merritt responded on the same note, “such heavy material—to turn in the hem, anyhow. Maybe you could feather-stitch it down—oh, how do you do, Mrs. Knapp? So glad to see you out. But then you’re one of the faithful ones, as Mr. Prouty always says.”
They all looked up from their work, smiling earnestly at her, drawing their needles in and out rapidly, and Evangeline Knapp knew from the expression of their eyes that they had been talking of her, of Lester’s failure to make good; that they had been pitying her from their superior position of women whose husbands were good providers.
She resented their pity—and yet it was a
