How should one learn the ways of apartment-houses when one had
lived always in a little gray, weather-beaten house, on the very
outskirts of a straggling village in Eastern Connecticut?
It happened like this. One day, Tom, the fourth of the nine hungry and
turbulent children, sent to the store on an errand, returned, bringing a
letter. A letter, that was not a circular about fertilizers, or one of
those polite and persuasive invitations to vote for a certain man for a
town office, which penetrated even to the Hand's little gray kennel of a
house toward election-time, was such a rarity that Mrs. Hand forgot the
bread just done in the oven, and sank down wearily on the door-step to
read it.
"Well, you ain't a-goin'," she said to Drusilla, who stood quite
patiently by, with a faint color in her pale face. "No, sir, you ain't
a-goin' one step. She was too stuck-up to come here when she was alive,
'n' you ain't a-goin' to take care of her children dead, 'n' that's the
end of it."
Druse made no reply. She never did. Instead, she bent her thin, childish
back, and pulled the burning bread out of the oven.
None the less, Druse went.
It was all Pop's work. Pop was meek and soft; he cried gently of a
Sunday evening at church, the tears trickling down the furrowed
leather-colored skin into the sparse beard, and on week-days he was wont
to wear a wide and vacuous smile; yet somehow, if Pop said this or that
should be, it was,--at least in the little house on the edge of the
village.
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