The Melting of Molly | Page 4

long I sat on the front steps all by myself bathed
in a perfect flood of moonlight and loneliness. It was not a bit of
comfort to hear Aunt Adeline snoring away in her room down the dark
hall. It takes the greatest congeniality to make a person's snoring a
pleasure to anybody and Aunt Adeline and I are not that way.
When poor Mr. Carter died, the next day she said: "Now, Mary, you are
entirely too young to live all your long years of widowhood alone, and
as I am in the same condition, I will rent my cottage and move right up
the street into your house to protect and console you." And she did,--the
moving and the protecting.
Mr. Henderson has been dead forty-two years. He only lived three
months after he married Aunt Adeline and her crepe veil is over a yard
long yet. Men are the dust under her feet, but she likes for Doctor John
to come over and sit on the porch with us because she can consult with
him about what Mr. Henderson really died of and talk with him about
the sad state of poor Mr. Carter's liver for a year before he died. I just
go on rocking Billy and singing hymns to him in such a way that I can't
hear the conversation. Mr. Carter's liver got on my nerves alive, and
dead it does worse. But it hurts when the doctor has to take the little
sleep-boy out of my arms to carry him home; though I like it when he
says under his breath, "Thank you, Molly."
And as I sat and thought how near he and I had been to each other in all
our troubles, I excused myself for running to him with that letter and I
acknowledged to myself that I had no right to get mad when he teased
me, for he had been kind and interested about helping me get thin by
the time Alfred came back to see me. I couldn't tell which I was
blushing all to myself about, the "luscious peach" he had called me or
the "lovely lily" Alfred had reminded me in his letter that I had been

when he left me.
Why don't people realize that a seventeen-year-old girl's heart is a
sensitive wind-flower that may be shattered by a breath? Mine
shattered when Alfred went away to find something he could do to
make a living, and Aunt Adeline gave the hard green stem to Mr. Carter
when she married me to him. Poor Mr. Carter!
No, I wasn't twenty, and this town was full of women who were aunts
and cousins and law-kin to me, and nobody did anything for me. They
all said with a sigh of relief, "It will be such a nice safe thing for you,
Molly." And they really didn't mean anything by tying up a gay,
dancing, frolicking, prancing colt of a girl with a terribly ponderous
bridle. But God didn't want to see me always trotting along slow and
tired and not caring what happened to me, even pounds and pounds of
plumpness, so he found use for Mr. Carter in some other place but this
world, and I feel that He is going to see me through whatever happens.
If some of the women in my missionary society knew how friendly I
feel with God they would put me out for contempt of court.
No, the town didn't mean anything by chastening my spirit with Mr.
Carter and they didn't consider him in the matter at all, poor man. Of
that I feel sure. Hillsboro is like that. It settled itself here in a Tennessee
valley a few hundreds of years ago and has been hatching and clucking
over its own small affairs ever since. All the houses set back from the
street with their wings spread out over their gardens, and mothers here
go on hovering even to the third and fourth generation. Lots of times
young, long-legged, frying-size boys scramble out of the nests and go
off to college and decide to grow up where their crow will be heard by
the world. Alfred was one of them.
And, too, occasionally some man comes along from the big world and
marries a plump little broiler and takes her away with him, but mostly
they stay and go to hovering life on a corner of the family estate. That's
what I did.
I was a poor, little, lost chick with frivolous tendencies and they all
clucked me over into this empty Carter nest which they considered
well-feathered for me. It gave them all a sensation when they found out
from the will just how well it was feathered. And it gave me one, too.
All that