Chapter 24

Henceforth, after his conversation with Miss Chatterwits, Ben was more attentive to her than he had ever been before. When he met her he always accompanied her to the door, and if she had been at the grocer’s or the baker’s, he insisted on carrying her parcels.

“I used to think it was very shiftless to buy bakers’ bread,” she said one day, apologizing for the large loaf which Ben had transferred under his own arm. “But it ain’t shiftless when you’re only one. It wouldn’t pay me to have a regular baking. The bread would get stale before I could eat it all,”—to which Ben assented.

“Ben always was a good boy,” she confided to a neighbor, “which it isn’t to be wondered at when you remember who his great-grandfather was. It isn’t every young man, especially with as good a position as he’s got, would walk up the street with an old woman like me.” She appreciated his kindness the more because the rising generation of the neighborhood paid very little attention to her. They beheld only a little old woman, somewhat bent in the back, with sparse, gray curls, queer clothes, and an affected walk, instead of the dignified person, as she pictured herself to be, whose acquaintance with better days gave her an elegance of aspect which the boys ought at least to respect.

Ben, therefore, realizing that the little woman was always glad to see him, made her frequent, if brief, calls. Sometimes he carried her a book, or some fruit, or at least a breath of news from the outside world—which she liked to hear about, even while professing to despise it. Perhaps Ben was not altogether single-minded in this matter—who of us is absolutely single-minded about anything? Perhaps he visited Miss Chatterwits as much to hear her talk about Kate as to give pleasure to the old lady herself.

Perhaps Miss Chatterwits, reading his mind better than he did himself, often talked purposely of the subject that lay so very near his heart. It was certainly no accident when she turned nervously to Ben one day with the words:

“There’s something I feel’s if I ought to tell you;”—and the young man rose from the little wooden rocker in which he had vainly tried to look comfortable, saying cheerfully:

“Is there? Well, do tell me.”

Then Miss Chatterwits bridled a little, and blushed, and said: “Well, of course, there’s some people that think an old maid hasn’t any real knowledge of matters relating to the affections”—she did not exactly like to come out broadly with “love affairs”—”but, so far as I’m concerned myself, I know pretty well what’s going on around me and how people feel about most things—though I don’t always tell what I know.”