she cried, her face pale and her whole
form trembling. "Nobody but that man in all this country would call
me that."

She hardly ever called Gowdy by any other name but "that man," so far as
I have heard. Something had taken place which struck her with a sort of
dumbness; and I really believe she could not then have spoken the name
Gowdy if she had tried. What it was that happened she never told any
one, unless it was Grandma Thorndyke, who was always dumb regarding the
sort of thing which all the neighbors thought took place. To Grandma
Thorndyke sex must have seemed the original curse imposed on our first
parents; eggs and link sausages were repulsive because they suggested
the insides of animals and vital processes; and a perfect human race
would have been to her made up of beings nourished by the odors of
flowers, and perpetuated by the planting of the parings of finger-nails
in antiseptic earth--or something of the sort. My live-stock business
always had to her its seamy side and its underworld which she always
turned her face away from--though I never saw a woman who could take a
new-born pig, calf, colt or fowl, once it was really brought forth so it
could be spoken of, and raise it from the dead, almost, as she could.
But every trace of the facts up to that time had to be concealed, and if
not they were ignored by Grandma Thorndyke. New England all over!

If Gowdy was actually guilty of the sort of affront to little Virginia
for which the public thought him responsible, I do not see how the girl
could ever have told it to grandma. I do not see how grandma could ever
have been made to understand it. I suspect that the worst that grandma
ever believed, was that Gowdy swore or used what she called vulgar
language in Virginia's presence. Knowing him as we all did afterward, we
suspected that he attempted to treat her as he treated all women--and as
I believe he could not help treating them. It seems impossible of
belief--his wife's orphan sister, the recent death of Ann Gowdy, the
girl's helplessness and she only a little girl; but Buck Gowdy was Buck
Gowdy, and that escape of his wife's sister and her flight over the
prairie was the indelible black mark against him which was pointed at
from time to 'time forever after whenever the people were ready to
forgive those daily misdoings to which a frontier people were not so
critical as perhaps they should have been. Indeed he gained a certain
popularity from his boast