Just like that, she said it. I heard her. Then I went out, of course,
an' left them. But I heard 'most everything that was said, just the
same, for I was right in the next room dustin', and the door wasn't
quite shut.

"First your grandmother said real polite--she was always polite--but
in a cold little voice that made even me shiver in the other room,
that she did not desire to be read to or sung to, and that she did not
wish to play games. She had called her daughter-in-law in to have a
serious talk with her. Then she told her, still very polite, that she
was noisy an' childish, an' undignified, an' that it was not only
silly, but very wrong for her to expect to have her husband's entire
attention; that he had his own work, an' it was a very important one.
He was going to be president of the college some day, like his
father before him; an' it was her place to help him in every way she
could--help him to be popular an' well-liked by all the college people
an' students; an' he couldn't be that if she insisted all the time on
keepin' him to herself, or lookin' sour an' cross if she couldn't have
him.

"Of course that ain't all she said; but I remember this part
particular on account of what happened afterward. You see--your
ma--she felt awful bad. She cried a little, an' sighed a lot, an' said
she'd try, she really would try to help her husband in every way she
could; an' she wouldn't ask him another once, not once, to stay with
her. An' she wouldn't look sour an' cross, either. She'd promise she
wouldn't. An' she'd try, she'd try, oh, so hard, to be proper an'
dignified.

"She got up then an' went out of the room so quiet an' still you