"Lydia is the nicest, but she has no more imagination than a turnip.
They are very uninteresting--my family," he said meditatively. "I
don't like any of them--except mother. Mother hasn't any sense, but
she's good," Sam ended earnestly.
"Oh, but you mustn't say things like that!"
"Why not? They're true," he said with a surprised look.
"Well, but we don't always tell the truth right out," she reminded
him.
"I do," said Sam, and then explained that he didn't include his
grandfather in his generalization. "Grandfather's bully; you ought to
hear him swear!"
"Oh, I don't want to!" she said horrified.
"I told him that I burned the prints up," Sam went on. "And he said,
'good riddance to bad rubbish.' That was just like grandfather! Of
course he did say that I was a d--I mean, a fool, to buy them in the
first place; and I knew I was. But having bought them, the only thing
to do was to burn them. But father!--"
Mrs. Richie's eyes crinkled with mischievous gayety. "Poor Mr.
Wright!"
Sam dropped his clasped hands between his knees. "It's queer how I
always do the wrong thing. Though it never seems wrong to me. You know
father would not let me go to college for fear I'd go to the devil?"
he laughed joyously. "But I might just as well, for be thinks
everything I do in Old Chester is wrong." Then he sighed. "Sometimes I
get pretty tired of being disapproved of;--especially as I never can
understand why it is. The fact is people are not reasonable," he
complained. "I can bear anything but unreasonableness."
She nodded. "I know, I never could please my grandmother--she brought
me up. My mother and father died when I was a baby. I think
grandmother hated me; she thought everything I did was wrong. Oh, I
was so miserable! And when I was eighteen I got married--and that was
a mistake."
Sam gazed up at her in silent sympathy, "I mean my--husband was so much older than I," she said. Then with an
evident effort to change the subject she added that one would think it
would be simple enough to be happy; "all my life I only wanted to be
happy," she said.
"You're happy now, aren't you?" he asked, She looked down at him--he was sitting on a stool before the fire near
her feet--and laughed with a catching of the breath. "Oh, yes, yes;
I'm happy."