Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

“ Fillebrown, evasively, persisting in the shelter of her phrase.
She went to bed and slept like a little girl. In the morning she woke quietly. Ghost or man, she had somehow ceased to be afraid of Joe. She felt the sacred power of the marriage bond close around her solemnly. Better, oh, best, a thousand times, forever be true wife, let shame, misery, mystery, death, come as they will!
She told Melissy, vouchsafing no explanation of this fearful domestic irregularity, to wait breakfast for a little, and then she opened the front door and looked out. ”

“ Not that there was the palest tinge of sentiment in the attitude of her mind towards her doctor. She would as soon have thought of romancing about Silas Whey, or even old Mr. Ginger. She was an experienced, indeed a cynical, widow, holding all masculine admiration at a cold distance, and the doctor was the infatuated bridegroom of a brand-new second wife. But he was the only person in the world (except Melissy) who knew how Mrs. Fillebrown felt, was sorry, and sometimes said so.
Most of us learn some one lesson out of life's primer better than all the rest put together. ”

“ You are always so kind! He says he shall feel so much easier about me," sighed Mrs. Fillebrown, gently, as she hung the receiver in its place. The manager bowed gravely.
"What have you been doing in the front hall, Melissy?" asked Mrs. Fillebrown, after the representative of the corporation had left the house.
"Oh, nothin'," observed Melissy, carelessly—"only offerin' that fellar a hot apple tart I had."
"Dear me, Melissy! I don't know about that. Is it quite—" Mrs. Fillebrown paused for a word. Had the telephone already begun to corrupt the manners of her irreproachable household? ”

“ Adoniram and Peter Parley had not been known to return. The stanch old-fashioned house, dating from the days when carpenters built "on honor," trembled through all its oaken skeleton. Now and then plaster rattled from somewhere overhead; a blind broke loose in the kitchen, and swung slapping till it smashed the window-pane. When Melissy went to fix it, she came back covered with snow.
"Do brush it off!" complained Mrs. Fillebrown. "You look like a dead person. Isn't that doctor in sight yet?" ”

“ Fillebrown. "I feel somehow—it is very foolish, I know—a little afraid of it. Well, if you think it best— Who's that? Doctor? Why, Doctor!" Her pale face flushed with pleasure. "Why, I can recognize his voice—that big, bass tone he has when he's hungry and cross. Doctor? Why, this is delightful. Thank you; I am very much better. I haven't had an attack for ten days. Now, if anything does happen, I can call you up, can't I? Two boys, did you say? How interesting! It never occurred to me that a sweet-potato man could have twins. I don't think I even knew he was a married man. ”

“ It had become quite the fashion in Northwest Peony to expect Mrs. Fillebrown to "fill up"—to meet those gaps in things which nobody else did or could. Was a watcher needed? Was a girl in trouble which only another woman and an older could understands? Was a young fellow bothered about his debts or his class oration? Ring up 24:4! Who will start the subscription to keep a forgotten old lady out of the poorhouse? Who will help out at the minister's while his wife brings the new baby into the world at the precise time when the other children have the measles? ”

“ Many of us study it in the form of a reiterated or monotonous trouble by which the unseen Power seems trying to screw some particular idea into our dull heads. Fortitude Fillebrown had learned the weakness of man, and what it means to woman. We might add that she had discovered the incurability of neurotic disorders; but that is secondary. You have seen carpenters screwing "bits" into hard wood, and have watched the shrinking, shrieking fibre as the tool bores its way. Supplant the wood by the living human brain, and that is neuralgia. ”

“ But the boring, physical agonies of all the years of her lonely life, in which she had so little else to think of except the bit and the bore, were transport beside that other kind of pain which a strong and loving woman endures when she first admits to herself that the man she loves does not deserve her warm and wasted trust, and that her marriage is a definite mistake. ”

“ Joe said, in one of his best moments, "and I'll come out right yet. You're quick, my girl, you know. Let a fellow have his rope, and don't yank him in and give him up because he tugs on it. I'm not all bad yet, Forty. Be patient with me, girl, as long as you can—won't you?"
Joe wore upon his watch-guard a little iron Greek cross that his wife had put there once to signalize some one of his repentant vows to be or do something that she had asked him, and when he said this, Joe fingered the iron cross nervously. He always did the day after a spree. ”

“ Beyond a word in behalf of Melissy's toothache, or a prescription for old Mr. Ginger's "left side," or a friendly suggestion what to do for those girls in the parish who were making themselves preeminent by eating slate-pencils and chewing the margins of the religious newspapers, the doctor had found limited professional occupation over the wires of 24:4.
Mrs. Fortitude Fillebrown had grown round and rosy, cheerful and calm. The electric spark which completed her circuit with the warm, human world had brought into her life as much as it carried out. ”

“ This pang of womanly weakness surprised Mrs. Fillebrown the more because she really had thought so little about Joe for some time past. She was rather glad when the telephone rang again, and she had to stagger in to the bedroom to answer it. The summons came from the manager, who wished to know how she liked the looks of her name and number on the new year-book, and regretted that he should not have the pleasure of serving so valuable a subscriber much longer. He was going to marry a Boston operator, and expected to be promoted to a city exchange. ”

“ One does not say Melissy's "mistress." Melissy was a Yankee and a neighbor. She did not serve. She "accommodated." But she had accommodated Mrs. Fillebrown affectionately for nearly ten years—ever since Joe Fillebrown died, and was buried in Northwest Peony churchyard, and Mrs. Fillebrown had erected a dutiful slab of Rutland marble to his not altogether blessed memory.
There is no fidelity more attractively loyal than the fidelity of an American domestic, when one is privileged to command a good specimen of its intelligence and energy. Mrs. Fillebrown had been thus fortunate. ”

“ MRS. FORTITUDE FILLEBROWN had neuralgia at the base of the brain, and Melissy Pulsifer had sent for the doctor. When Melissy experienced a similar disorder she called it a headache behind. But Mrs. Fillebrown had neuralgia at the base of the brain.
Now it snowed—only a New England February knows how it snowed—and the road to the village was blocked. Melissy got badly drabbled wading over to Silas Whey's to ask Silas to send Adoniram out with old Peter Parley to bring the doctor. Melissy came home soaked.
"You'll be down yourself," sighed Mrs. Fillebrown. ”

“ But in a few moments the bell called again.
"Forty! I forgot to tell you. I've kept track of you, you know, all this while. I never meant to let you get into any scrape. I wasn't so bad as that. And, girl, I can have the exchange at Peony Centre if you'd rather stay on in the old home. It's a small job—there's a bigger in Boston for the taking—but I'd like to please you. Think it over, will you?"
"I'll think it over, Joe."
"And, Forty, girl, do you think you care enough for me"—
"I never cared for any man but you, Joe Fillebrown, in all my life." ”

“ From that hour she began to cast up the black items in the long sum by which a woman tries to solve the problem—given dead honor and dying love, how preserve enough happiness to keep alive on and save a home? ”

“ She had reached one of those crevices to be found on the steeps of the most noble of lives, where sacrifice itself takes on the weariness and doubtfulness of all human endeavor, and where the climb seems hardly worth the muscle. ”

“ When Joe had been dead so many years that Melissy almost lost track of them, "Lordy," thought Melissy, "I calc'late she'd take a lickin' every day to set her eyes on him for a spell."
Melissy supposed it was because she had never been married that she found it so hard to understand the grief of the drunkard's widow. The old maid did not respect the wife altogether for this mystery of conjugal allegiance.
"When a man ain't wuth it," mused Melissy, "he ain't wuth." ”

“ She had told the dressmaker not to put on that expensive trimming. She had asked Mrs. Silas Whey how Silas's throat was, and wasn't there anything she could do? Oh, and how was Peter Parley's left hind ankle? She had ordered lemons from the grocer's for Rebecca at the Well. She had ordered extract of beef from the druggist's for the wife of the sweet-potato man, who had blessed the sweet-potato man and shocked the village by adding a cross-eyed, red-haired girl to her year-old twins. ”

“ She was so starved for common human affection that she eagerly devoured the professional substitute for it—that pseudo-sympathy, that discreet dose of friendly interest, which is all that so many ailing and lonely women get from any source. ”

“ Across that tiny, trembling wire all her little world came to her, and thereby she ventured out to it.
One day the Northwest Peony Church (having heard it rumored in Boston that the modern improvements in religion called upon all active parishes to keep open church) , in a burst of Christian good sense, put a telephone into the vestry. Then Mrs. Fillebrown may be said to have begun to live; for then she found her hands and heart full (or, more precisely and telephonically speaking, her ears and mouth full) of the miseries of other people ”

“ He's deef as a seraphim on a gravestone, and drags on the left side sence he had his stroke," remarked Melissy. "An' I'd like to know how long you'd hev Adoniram perfumin' up this house—feelin' the way you do about caows."
"Have a telephone," suggested the doctor, with the cosmopolitan air that he wore when he had been to Boston, and felt that he was what he called "in touch with the world." "It is cheaper than a man, and more protection. You are quite able, Mrs. Fillebrown, to afford these modern improvements. Really, I should feel much easier about you." ”

“ She owned their pretty home, and had enough for two to live on, with the old-fashioned economy to which her father had trained her. (He was master of the Peony Centre High-School, and had written an arithmetic successful in its day.) But Joe liked other ways. He developed habits as foreign to her simple ideas as the milieu of Monte Carlo. It took her a long time to understand what these meant. The wife is the last person to hear the truth about the life of a dissipated man. ”

“ The doctor treated the symptom gleefully, as he would the squalls of a convalescent baby.
"I won't go through another such night, not even to please Providence!" snapped Mrs. Fillebrown. "We might starve, or freeze, or be murdered in our beds here—for all Northwest Peony. It's no sort of way to live. I'm going to have a man in the house if I live till the snow-plough gets out!"
"There ain't nobody but Adoniram and old Mr. ”