Alvira, "Why, they do say the poor thing has to go down those back stairs
and actually split her own kindlings--with that healthy loafer setting
around in the good clothes she buys him, in the back room of that
drug-store from morning till night. And what's worse, he's been seen with
that eldest--"

Here the caller's eyes had briefly shifted sidewise at the small listener,
whereupon Clytie had urged him to run along and play like a good boy. He
pondered at length that which he had overheard and then he went to Miss
Alvira's wood-pile at the foot of her back stairs, reached by turning up
the alley from Main Street. He split a large pile of kindling for her. He
would have been glad to do this each day, had not Miss Alvira proved to be
lacking in delicacy. Instead of ignoring him, when she saw him from her
back window, where she was second-fitting Samantha Rexford's pink waist,
she came out with her mouth full of pins and gave him five cents and tried
to kiss him. Of course, he never went back again. If _that_ was the kind
she was she could go on doing the work herself. He was no Ralph Overton or
Ben Holt, to be shamed that way and made to feel that he had been Doing
Good, and be spoken of all the time as "our Hero."

As for Cousin Bill J., of _course_ he was a loafer! Who wouldn't be if he
had the chance? But it was false and cruel to say that he was a healthy
loafer. When Cousin Bill J. was healthy he had been able to fell an ox
with one blow of his fist.

Nor was he disturbed seriously by rumours that his hero was a
"come-outer"; that instead of attending church with Miss Alvira he could
be heard at the barbershop of a Sabbath morning, agreeing with Milo Barrus
that God might have made the world in six days and rested on the seventh;
but he couldn't have made the whale swallow Jonah, because it was against