It seems that the Rutherford temper developed in the Princess as she
grew older. Mrs. Swaney was Juanita Sinclair; her father was a
mild-mannered little man, who went out of doors to cough, but her mother
was a Rutherford--a big, stiff-necked, beer-bottle-shaped woman, who
bossed the missionary society until she divided the church. John Swaney,
who is not a talkative man, once got in a crowd at Smith's cigar-store
where they were telling ghost stories, and his contribution to the
horror of the occasion was a relating of how, when they were fooling
with tables, trying to make them tip at his house one night at a family
reunion, the spirit of Grandma Rutherford appeared, split the table into
kindling, dislocated three shoulder-blades and sprained five wrists. It
was this Rutherford temper that the Princess wore when she slouched
around the house in her mother-hubbard with her hair in papers. The
girls in the office used to say that if her mother over-cooked the
Princess's egg in the morning she would rise grandly from the breakfast
table, tipping over her chair behind her, and rush to her room "to have
a good cry," and the whole family had to let the breakfast cool while
they coaxed her down. That was the Rutherford temper. Also, when they
tried to teach her to cook, it was the Rutherford temper that broke the
dishes. Colonel Morrison once told us that when the Princess thought it
was time to give a party, the neighbours could see the Rutherford temper
begin wig-wagging at the world through the Princess's proud head, and
there was nothing for her father to do but to kill the chickens, run
errands all day to the grocery store, and sit in the cellar freezing
cream, and then go to the barn at night to smoke. It was known in the
neighbourhood that the Princess dragged her shoestrings until noon, and
that her bed was never in the memory of woman made up in the daytime. We
are Yankees in our town, and these things made more talk to the girl's
discredit than the story that she was keeping company with Red Martin!

But we at the office saw in the proud creature that passed our window so
grandly nothing to indicate her real self. The year that Red Martin came
back to town the Princess used to turn into Main Street in an afternoon,
wearing the big black hat that cost her father a week's hard work,
looking as sweet as a jug of sorghum and as smiling as a basket of
chips. Though women sniffed at her, the men on the veranda of the Hote