Mrs. Deans' mind was somewhat "out of drawing" to her body, which was broad, large, fair, and of generous proportions. Why fat and good-temper should have been so long proverbially associated is difficult to discern; in so far as the ordinary mind can analyze, it would seem as if adipose was a distinct excuse for bad temper. To be hotter than other people in summer and not so cold in winter is one of the simplest and most obvious results of fat--yet who shall say this is conducive to sympathy with other people?
Mrs. Deans had been a Warner, and was inclined to goitre. Her large head, with its oily bands of fair hair, was always somewhat inclined backwards. Her general appearance suggested, in a remote way, a colossal and bad-tempered pouter pigeon--a likeness absurdly emphasized sometimes by the redness of her eyes.
When Myron Holder crossed the threshold with the quilting-frames, a scene characteristic of the place greeted her. Mrs. Deans stood in the foreground, holding the floor; her husband listened to her eloquence, blinking appreciatively if somewhat apprehensively. You never knew--to use one of her own expressions--when you "had Mrs. Deans, and when you hadn't." She was apt to deflect suddenly from the chase she was engaged in, and start full cry after another's shortcomings. More than once Henry Deans, enjoying himself hugely while his wife browbeat the bound girls, had his joy turned to mourning by suddenly discovering that the peroration of his wife's address had for its inspiration his own shortcomings.
His wife was, as he confided to Gamaliel, "onsartain"; it was a perilous joy to listen to her, and, therefore, perhaps, the more exhilarating.
The bound girl--a slight, tow-headed child with high, unequal shoulders, and arms, and wrists, developed by her life of toil into absurd disproportion to her body--stood by the stove, listening with a dazed look in her weary eyes. She had broken a seven-cent lamp-glass.
Myron put aside the basket of groceries, took the quilting-frames to an empty corner, and set about her preparations for the weekly washing. The bound girl still stood motionless by the fire, and Mrs. Deans still talked; her husband was shifting uneasily in his chair, for her remarks were beginning to wander from the case in point, and her condemnations and criticisms were becoming too sweeping to be altogether pleasant, when, much to the relief of her hearers, Mrs. Deans' attention was distracted by the arrival of the ragman, with his noisy, rattling van, piled high with coarse, bulging sacks of canvas. Mrs. Deans assumed her sunbonnet, and went out to him. He was a man of sixty or so, thin, good-humored, and with what Mrs. Deans called, "An eye to the main chance." Perched high upon the seat of his old-fashioned blue van, he was exposed to all the variableness of the weather; but he took sunshine and rain in good part, and seemed little the worse, save that he was tanned to a fine mahogany tint.