She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she
had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom
introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it, and then
suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she
obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred; as when
she warded off reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way
that she had lived with ladies who used to come scolding into the
kitchen after they had taken their bitters. "Quality ladies took their
bitters regular," she added, to remove any sting of personality from her
remark; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not
regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us
with the gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over
whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and
four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the
ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of
the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to
have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and
preserved somewhere among her best clothes.

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so original
and suggestive as Mrs. Johnson's. We loved to trace its intricate yet
often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of explaining
its peculiarities by facts of ancestry,--of finding hints of the Pow-wow
or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of
something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something
wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest.
She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no
morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she
might have been a saint far more easily than far more civilized people.