Miss Gibbie's carriage was at the gate, and before the others know what to say she conducted Mrs. Pryor out of the room, put her in the carriage herself, and gave the order to Jackson to drive her home. "Tell Maria to telephone me here in half an hour how William is," she called, "and if you need me let me know," then went back into the house where all were talking at once.  
"Do you reckon he is really ill, Miss Gibbie?" inquired Mrs. Webb, and "he's so uncomplaining they might not know he was ill," said Mrs. Moon, while Mrs. Tazewell, full of sympathy, thought they ought to adjourn¹ and go see if there was not something they could do.
 
"Which of those questions do you want me to answer first?" Miss Gibbie, taking Mrs. Pryor's chair, waved the turkey-wing fan back and forth², but with fingers not so firm as they had been before the message came, and as she spoke³ the room became quiet again.
 
"Do I hope William Pryor is seriously ill?" she began, her keen gray eyes dim with something rarely seen in them. "Do I hope William is going to die? I do. For thirty-nine years he has been the husband of Lizzie Pryor, and he has earned his reward. I don't believe in a golden-harp⁴ heaven. Not being musical, William and I wouldn't know what to do with a harp. I believe in a heaven where we get away from some people and get back to others, and God knows I hope William will have a little respite⁵ before Lizzie joins him.
 
"I don't know Mr. Pryor very well," said Mrs. Brent, who had moved closer to the table in the general uprising due to Mrs. Pryor's departure, "but I've always felt sorry for him somehow. He had such a patient, frightened face, and was so polite."
 
"That was what ruined him." Miss Gibbie's voice was steady again. "Many wives are ruined by over-politeness. They take advantage of it, and make their husbands spend their lives in an eternal effort to please. That's what poor William was forever attempting to do, and never succeeding. He was Apology in the flesh. No matter what he did in the morning he had to explain it at night."
 
"He had to," broke in Mrs. Tate, who still held her needle between finger and thumb. "If he didn't, Mrs. Pryor breathed so through her nose you couldn't say in the house with her. I was there once when she wanted to go to her sister's in Washington to get new dresses for Maria and Anna Belle⁶ and Sue, and Mr. Pryor had ventured to say he didn't have the money. You ought to have seen her! She hardly spoke to me, and Louisa told me afterward⁷ they didn't see her teeth for a week, she kept her lips down on them so tight. Poor Mr. Pryor, I saw him a day or two afterward on his way home to dinner, and he looked like he would rather go to—"
 
"Hell. Speak out. I would, had I been he." Miss Gibbie blew her nose, put the handkerchief back in the bag hanging from her belt, took out her spectacles and laid them on the table. "Any kind of woman can be endured better than a sulking woman. She's worse than a nagger⁸, and home is a place of perdition with that kind in it. But in a sense William deserved what he got. He let her marry him."
 
"Oh, she didn't ask him!" Mrs. Burnham was from the North, and her voice was astonished interrogation. "Surely she didn't ask him!"
 
"No. She made him ask her. Made him feel so sorry for her, cried over herself and her loneliness so persistently⁹ that William, being a man, walked in. Six weeks later they were married."
 
"I wonder if it was really true the way they say she used to do," and
Mrs. Tate, whose needle was now lost, was again fanning vigorously.
"What way?" Miss Gibbie turned so quickly toward her that Mrs. Tate jumped.
 
"Why, I heard when s............