“Well, I never knew a Mulbridge yet ’t objected to prop’ty,—especially, other folks’s.”
“Barlow he’s tellin’ round that she’s very fine appearin’.” He handed the corn-ball to Widow Seth Wray’s boy, who went noiselessly out on his bare feet.
Cap’n Billy drew several long breaths. When another man might have been supposed to have dismissed the subject he said, “Well, I never knew a Mulbridge that objected to good looks in women folks. They’ve all merried hahnsome wives, ever since the old gentleman set ’em the example with his second one. They got their own looks from the first. Well,” he added, “I hope she’s a tough one. She’s got either to bend or to break.”
“They say,” said Cap’n George Wray, like one rising from the dead to say it, so dumb and motionless had he been till now, “that Mis’ Mulbridge was too much for the old doctor.”
“I don’t know about that,” Cap’n Billy replied, “but I guess her son’s too much for her: she’s only Gardiner, and he’s Gardiner and Mulbridge both.”
No one changed countenance, but a sense of Cap’n Billy’s wit sparely yet satisfyingly glimmered from the eyes of Cap’n George and the storekeeper, and Cap’n Jabez closed his knife with a snap and looked up. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “she’s seen enough of him to know beforehand that there would be too much of him.”
“I never rightly understood,” said Hackett, “just what it was about him, there in the army—coming out a year beforehand, that way.”
“I guess you never will,—from _him_,” said Cap’n Jabez.
“Laziness, I guess,—too much work,” said old Cap’n Billy. “What he wants is a wife with money. There ain’t a better doctor anywhere. I’ve heard ’t up to Boston, where he got his manifest, they thought everything of him. He’s smart enough, but he’s lazy, and he always was lazy, and harder’n a nut. He’s a curious mixtur’. ’N’ I guess he’s been on the lookout for somethin’ of this kind ever sence he begun practising among the summer boarders. Guess he’s had an eye out.”
“They say he’s poplar among ’em,” observed the storekeeper thoughtfully.
“He’s been pooty p’tic’lar, or _they_ have,” said Cap’n Jabez.
“Well, most on ’em’s merried women,” Hackett urged. “It’s astonishin’ how they do come off and leave their husbands, the whole summer long. They say they’re all out o’ health, though.”