The Lady of the Aroostook

The Lady of the Aroostook

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Title: The Lady of the Aroostook
Author: W. D. Howells
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THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK
BY W. D. HOWELLS

THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK

I.
In the best room of a farm-house on the skirts of a village in the hills of
Northern Massachusetts, there sat one morning in August three people
who were not strangers to the house, but who had apparently assembled
in the parlor as the place most in accord with an unaccustomed finery in
their dress. One was an elderly woman with a plain, honest face, as
kindly in expression as she could be perfectly sure she felt, and no
more; she rocked herself softly in the haircloth arm-chair, and
addressed as father the old man who sat at one end of the table between
the windows, and drubbed noiselessly upon it with his stubbed fingers,
while his lips, puckered to a whistle, emitted no sound. His face had
that distinctly fresh-shaven effect which once a week is the advantage
of shaving no oftener: here and there, in the deeper wrinkles, a frosty
stubble had escaped the razor. He wore an old-fashioned, low black
satin stock, over the top of which the linen of his unstarched collar
contrived with difficulty to make itself seen; his high-crowned,
lead-colored straw hat lay on the table before him. At the other end of
the table sat a young girl, who leaned upon it with one arm, propping
her averted face on her hand. The window was open beside her, and she
was staring out upon the door-yard, where the hens were burrowing for
coolness in the soft earth under the lilac bushes; from time to time she

put her handkerchief to her eyes.
"I don't like this part of it, father," said the elderly woman, --"Lyddy's
seeming to feel about it the way she does right at the last moment, as
you may say." The old man made a noise in his throat as if he might
speak; but he only unpuckered his mouth, and stayed his fingers, while
the other continued: "I don't want her to go now, no more than ever I
did. I ain't one to think that eatin' up everything on your plate keeps it
from wastin', and I never was; and I say that even if you couldn't get the
money back, it would cost no more to have her stay than to have her
go."
"I don't suppose," said the old man, in a high, husky treble, "but what I
could get some of it back from the captain; may be all. He didn't seem
any ways graspin'. I don't want Lyddy should feel, any more than you
do, Maria, that we're glad to have her go. But what I look at is this: as
long as she has this idea--Well, it's like this --I d'know as I can express
it, either." He relapsed into the comfort people find in giving up a
difficult thing.
"Oh, I know!" returned the woman. "I understand it's an opportunity;
you might call it a leadin', almost, that it would be flyin' in the face of
Providence to refuse. I presume her gifts were given her for
improvement, and it would be the same as buryin' them in the ground
for her to stay up here. But I do say that I want Lyddy should feel just
so about goin', or not go at all. It