The Lady of the Aroostook. William Dean Howells

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      V.

      A few hours later Deacon Latham came into the house with a milk-pan full of pease. He set this down on one end of the kitchen table, with his straw hat beside it, and then took a chair at the other end and fell into the attitude of the day before, when he sat in the parlor with Lydia and Miss Maria waiting for the stage; his mouth was puckered to a whistle, and his fingers were held above the board in act to drub it. Miss Maria turned the pease out on the table, and took the pan into her lap. She shelled at the pease in silence, till the sound of their pelting, as they were dropped on the tin, was lost in their multitude; then she said, with a sharp, querulous, pathetic impatience, “Well, father, I suppose you're thinkin' about Lyddy.”

      “Yes, Maria, I be,” returned her father, with uncommon plumpness, as if here now were something he had made up his mind to stand to. “I been thinkin' that Lyddy's a woman grown, as you may say.”

      “Yes,” admitted Miss Maria, “she's a woman, as far forth as that goes. What put it into your head?”

      “Well, I d'know as I know. But it's just like this: I got to thinkin' whether she mightn't get to feelin' rather lonely on the voyage, without any other woman to talk to.”

      “I guess,” said Miss Maria, tranquilly, “she's goin' to feel lonely enough at times, any way, poor thing! But I told her if she wanted advice or help about anything just to go to the stewardess. That Mrs. Bland that spent the summer at the Parkers' last year was always tellin' how they went to the stewardess for most everything, and she give her five dollars in gold when they got into Boston. I shouldn't want Lyddy should give so much as that, but I should want she should give something, as long's it's the custom.”

      “They don't have 'em on sailin' vessels, Captain Jenness said; they only have 'em on steamers,” said Deacon Latham.

      “Have what?” asked Miss Maria, sharply.

      “Stewardesses. They've got a cabin-boy.”

      Miss Maria desisted a moment from her work; then she answered, with a gruff shortness peculiar to her, “Well, then, she can go to the cook, I suppose. It wouldn't matter which she went to, I presume.”

      Deacon Latham looked up with the air of confessing to sin before the whole congregation. “The cook's a man,—a black man,” he said.

      Miss Maria dropped a handful of pods into the pan, and sent a handful of peas rattling across the table on to the floor. “Well, who in Time”—the expression was strong, but she used it without hesitation, and was never known to repent it “will she go to, then?”

      “I declare for't,” said her father, “I don't know. I d'know as I ever thought it out fairly before; but just now when I was pickin' the pease for you, my mind got to dwellin' on Lyddy, and then it come to me all at once: there she was, the only one among a whole shipful, and I—I didn't know but what she might think it rather of a strange position for her.”

      “Oh!” exclaimed Miss Maria, petulantly. “I guess Lyddy'd know how to conduct herself wherever she was; she's a born lady, if ever there was one. But what I think is—” Miss Maria paused, and did not say what she thought; but it was evidently not the social aspect of the matter which was uppermost in her mind. In fact, she had never been at all afraid of men, whom she regarded as a more inefficient and feebler-minded kind of women.

      “The only thing't makes me feel easier is what the captain said about the young men,” said Deacon Latham.

      “What young men?” asked Miss Maria.

      “Why, I told you about 'em!” retorted the old man, with some exasperation.