Whaley found her one morning at her churn
with that letter on her knee, the dasher inactive in a steadily extended
hand.

"Who's that from?" he inquired. "Oh, I see! She writes powerful often,
don't she? Well, how does she like it?"

Mrs. Whaley was silent, her eyes on the milk-coated hole in the
churn-lid through which the worn dasher was wont to glide up and down.
Noting her mood, Whaley gruffly took up the letter and, adjusting his
black-rimmed nose-glasses, he read it.

"What do you think of it?" she asked, when he put it down.

"I don't know as I think anything much about it," was his response.
"House, house, house! That is all there is in it--tables here and chairs
there, a new organ, cook-stove that runs by gas, and water on tap within
arm's-length--to say nothing of milk left on the front-door step, as
well as a block of ice in summer-time every morning. All that, I say,
but not one word about the big union-tabernacle-tent revival that
Cavanaugh said was to open there this week? I'd walk ten miles through
the broiling sun to meet that preacher and hear him rip the hide off of
the ungodly down there. That town is just big enough to be full of hell,
'blind-tiger' joints, and houses full of shamefaced strumpets that are
fined in city court and allowed to keep on even by the law in their
devilish occupation."

Mrs. Whaley was never known to sigh. Sighs are born of elements which
she had suppressed till they had died a natural death, but there was
something in her very uncommunicating manner that provoked her husband's
lingering at her side.

"You don't say what you think," he said, restoring his glasses to their
tin case and snapping its lid down.

She raised her eyes and fixed them on his. "It is not what she says,
but what it seems to me she ought to say and don't that seems strange to
me," was her reply. "Why, there is no mention at all about any of John's
kin--not one single word about his mother--not one single word about any
woman stepping in even for a minute. I don't care anything about your
tabernacles or your whisky-joints--what seems strange to me is that
Tilly don't seem to have made a single acquaintance since she got there.
She writes, you see, about Cavanaugh coming over and why his wife
didn't, as if that was something to tell. She writes about John being
away in the country all day, and, as far as I can gather, she is at home
all by herself from dawn till nightfall. There is something powerf