I was not worried about their clothes, their taking cold, or sticking
the darts into their fingers, but I was beginning to realize the
responsibility of consequences. What would the effect of this fete be
upon the birthday parties of our village community, where a dish of
mottoes, a home-made frosted sponge cake, and a freezer of ice cream
(possibly, but not always) from town, eaten out-of-doors, meant bliss.
I suppose it is only the comfortably poor who have to think of
consequences, the uncomfortably rich think they can afford not to,
and tired of mere possession, they must express their wealth audibly
at any cost.
* * * * *
Richard and Ian came home about half past six, driven by Timothy
Saunders, who was in a sulky mood. When I asked him, by way of cheerful
conversation, if the Vanderveer grounds did not look pretty, and if he
had heard the band (he is very fond of music), he fairly glowered at me
as he used in his bachelor days, before Martha's energetic affection had
mellowed him, and he began to jerk out texts, his dialect growing more
impossible each moment, so that the only words that I caught were
"scarlet weemen--Philistines--wrath--mammon o' the unriteous," etc.,
until I seized the boys and fled into the porch, because when Timothy
Saunders is wrathful, and quotes scripture as a means of expressing it,
some one must fly, and it is never Timothy.
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