MONUMENT OR TROUSSEAU?


Men are very strange people. They are like those horrible sums in
algebra that you think about and worry about and cry about and try to
get help from other women about, and then, all of a sudden, X works
itself out into perfectly good sense. Not that I thought much about Mr.
Carter, poor man! When he wasn't right around I felt it best to forget
him as much as I could, but it seems hard for other women to let you
forget either your husband or theirs.

I know now that I really never got any older than the poor, foolish,
eighteen-years' child that Aunt Adeline married off "safe", all the time
I was the "refuge" sort of wife. I would sit and listen while the other
wives talked over the men in utter bewilderment and most times terror,
then I would force myself to a little more forgetting and poor Mr.
Carter must have suffered the consequences. But all that was a mild sort
of exasperation to what a widow has to go through with in the matter
of--of, well I think hazing is about the best name to give it.

"Molly Carter," said Mrs. Johnson just day before yesterday, after the
white-dress, Judge-Wade episode that Aunt Adeline had gone to all the
friends up and down the street to be consoled about, "if you haven't got
sense enough to appreciate your present blissful condition somebody
ought to operate on your mind."

I was tempted to say, "Why not my heart?" I was glad she didn't know
how good that heart did feel under my tucker when the boy brought that
basket of fish from Judge Wade's fishing trip Saturday. I have firmly