The Iron Woman | Page 7

dancing and vanity were somehow related in
her uncle's mind; so the vital, vivid little creature expressed the rhythm
that was in her by dancing without instruction, keeping time with loud,
elemental cadences of her own composing, not always melodious, but
always in time. Sometimes she danced thus in the school-room;
sometimes in Mrs. Todd's "ice-cream parlor" at the farther end of
Mercer's old wooden bridge; once--and this was one of the occasions
when Mr. Ferguson thought he had detected the vice he dreaded--once
she danced in his very own library! Up and down she went, back and
forth, before a long mirror that stood between the windows. She had
put a daffodowndilly behind each ear, and twisted a dandelion chain
around her neck. She looked, as she came and went, smiling and
dimpling at herself in the shadowy depths of the mirror, like a flower--a
flower in the wind!-- bending and turning and swaying, and singing as
she danced: "Oh, isn't it joyful--joyful--joyful!"

It was then that her uncle came upon her; for just a moment he stood
still in involuntary delight, then remembered his theories; there was
certainly vanity in her primitive adornment! He knocked his glasses off
with a fierce gesture, and did his duty by barking at her,--as Mrs.
Maitland would have expressed it. He told her in an angry voice that
she must go to bed for the rest of the day! at least, if she ever did it
again, she must go to bed for the rest of the day.
Another time he felt even surer of the feminine failing: Elizabeth said,
in his presence, that she wished she had some rings like those of a
certain Mrs. Richie, who had lately come to live next door; at which Mr.
Ferguson barked at Miss White, barked so harshly that Elizabeth flew
at him like a little enraged cat. "Stop scolding Cherry-pie! You hurt her
feelings; you are a wicked man!" she screamed, and beating him with
her right hand, she fastened her small, sharp teeth into her left arm just
above the wrist--then screamed again with self-inflicted pain. But when
Miss White, dismayed at such a loss of self- control, apologized for her,
Mr. Ferguson shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't mind temper," he said; "I used to have a temper myself; but I
will not have her vain! Better put some plaster on her arm. Elizabeth,
you must not call Miss White by that ridiculous name."
The remark about Mrs. Richie's rings really disturbed him; it made him
deplore to himself the advent as a neighbor of a foolish woman. "She'll
put ideas into Elizabeth's head," he told himself. In regard to the rings,
he had not needed Elizabeth to instruct him. He had noticed them
himself, and they had convinced him that this Mrs. Richie, who at first
sight seemed a shy, sad woman with no nonsense about her, was really
no exception to her sex. "Vain and lazy, like the rest of them," he said
cynically. Having passed the age when he cared to sport with Amaryllis,
he did not, he said, like women. When he was quite a young man, he
had added, "except Mrs. Maitland." Which remark, being repeated to
Molly Wharton, had moved that young lady to retort that the reason
that Sarah Maitland was the only woman he liked, was that Sarah
Maitland was not a woman! "The only feminine thing about her is her
petticoats," said Miss Wharton, daintily. For which mot, Robert

Ferguson never forgave her. He certainly did not expect to like this
new-comer in Mercer, this Mrs. Richie, but he had gone to see her. He
had been obliged to, because she wished to rent a house he owned next
door to the one in which he lived. So, being her landlord, he had to see
her, if for nothing else, to discourage requests for inside repairs. He saw
her, and promised to put up a little glass house at the end of the back
parlor for a plant-room. "If she'd asked me for a 'conservatory,'" he said
to himself, "I wouldn't have considered it for a moment; but just a few
sashes--I suppose I might as well give in on that? Besides, if she likes
flowers, there must be something to her." All the same, he was
conscious of having given in, and to a woman who wore rings; so he
was quite gruff with Mrs. Richie's little boy, whom he found listening
to an harangue from Elizabeth. The two children had scraped
acquaintance through the iron fence that separated the piazzas of the
two houses. "I," Elizabeth had announced, "have a mosquito-bite on my
leg; I'll show it to you," she said, generously; and when the bite on her
little thigh was displayed, she