At last, after a pause, Rose spoke for herself.
“It seems to me wonderful that you, who have gone through so much, could have stood it as you seem to have done.” She herself was at the opening age of doubts and questions. At times the discontentment of a life without the definite aims of a man’s career distressed her. Yet she had surely all that one could ask of existence; and here was this poverty-haunted woman supremely cheerful under circumstances such as would have ruined all capacity for happiness in most of her sex. Rose went on, half surprised at her own frankness:
“I have everything in the world, and sometimes I am not happy. I ought to be ashamed.”
“Well, Miss Rose, I did use to bother, but I gave it up. As long as you’re here, you’re here. I’m like a pig Hiram used to have out West. He was a very enterprising pig, and was always a-trying to get into the pea-patch and out of his own field. One day I was watching that pig,—I used to think that pig could laugh,—well, he spied an angle of a great big, dead cottonwood-tree Hiram had set to stop the gap in a fence. You see, the two ends of it were in the field, and it was hollow right through trunk and limb, and the point of it stuck out into my pea-patch. So, Mr. Pig, in he goes, and after much scratching he got through the trunk, and then through the big branch, and then out he came, and there he was in the same field again. Well, he tried it three times and then he gave it up; looked like he’d have liked to scratch his head; and after that he was the contentedest pig you ever saw. And when sticking-time came, at Christmas, he didn’t squeal any morsel louder than the rest. I guess I’m a good deal like that pig. I’ve quit trying to get out of my field, and so I just stay here and grin, and take what comes.”
“Thank you,” said Rose, smiling. “That is a delightful parable, Mrs. Maybrook.” And with it Rose ceased awhile to hear what her companion said, and took stern measures with herself, because of the thoughts this woman’s life and words had brought to her.
Dorothy was at times, when her audience suited her, a person who talked herself out in liberal amount, finding in self-utterance one of her few and most distinct pleasures. Yet she was never so full of herself as entirely to cease to think of others. She saw in a few minutes that Rose had lost hold of the talk, and was at intervals saying, “Yes, yes,” in an absent way, so as to keep up a decent appearance of being still interested in her companion’s words. Dorothy had by no means fine manners, but she had the automatically active instincts of a woman to whom tact was a natural gift. She too became silent, and they walked on for a time without more exchange of words.