“Not at all. Not at _all_,” she replied emphatically, as she let fly her second wet stocking and it landed on the fresh shirt-waist I had been so careful to hang on the back of a chair. “When the colossal idea of opening a tea-room struck me, instead of considering risks as a person of weaker mentality undoubtedly would, I went ahead and did. Now see where I am!—until this freeze came and burst my water-pipes and the gas froze on me I was feeding half the village.”
“Half the village,” I murmured, at a loss for words—only a few days before Christmas her younger sister, a hard-working, serious girl, had been forced to pay two hundred and fifty dollars to keep Hildegarde’s eating-place from being closed. Having lived in the house with Hildegarde for more than three months, I realized the hopelessness of attempting to make her see the truth, so I changed the subject. “You didn’t finish telling me about the two poets. Did they go on a wedding trip?”
“They are spending the night in my shop,” she told me, still busy rubbing her toes.
“What on earth?” I questioned, so amazed that I forgot to notice that she was slipping her feet between my sheets. “You have no sleeping arrangements—only small tables and narrow benches.”
“Joe Ellen said it was better than taking Harris to her room and to-morrow morning being ordered to leave the house or produce their marriage license. They don’t intend the general public to know of their marriage—not until they find a publisher for their first book of poems in collaboration.”
“Oh!” was my meek reply, as I wondered why she had let me into such an important secret. “They might have gone to a hotel,” was my next remark, and being a normal idea it was so far out of focus that it impressed me as an inspiration.
“Hotel?” she questioned indignantly. “That would have killed every bit of romance. Besides, Joe Ellen only had seven dollars and a half—a check she received for one of her short poems. Then, of course, as Mr. Freeland pointed out, there was Harris’s clothes.”
“Mr. Freeland? He would have been best man had he received Harris’s note in time. It was he who discovered Harris—a terrible night last November. Harris had come up from Texas and was selling papers with his feet wrapped in an old piece of carpet he had fished out of a garbage-can.”