Page:Emma Speed Sampson--The shorn lamb.djvu/99

Rh ladder. No one could have believed that Rolfe Bolling had in his veins a drop of the aristocratic blood of the Cavaliers. He was illiterate, untidy, miserly, pugnacious. He could write with difficulty and often varied in spelling his own name. His father, who was a weak, dull man, had tried to have his son educated, but Rolfe had refused with the stubbornness which characterized him.

"Book larnin' ain't nothin' but foolishness," he had asserted in the vernacular learned from Aunt Peachy, his old colored mammy. "Readin' an' writin' don't git rid er no tater bugs, an' spellin' don't grow no craps. Th'ain't no man in this here county what kin do me out'n a nickel that he owes me, an' it don't take much 'rithmetic fer me ter know that a dollar saved is a dollar an' six cents in a year an' a dollar spent is mo'n apt ter drag some mo' along with it."

Why Elizabeth Wheeler had married Rolfe Bolling had been the wonder of the neighborhood. She was a handsome, upstanding girl who might have done better for herself. Twenty-five years had elapsed since she had come as a bride to The Hedges, and hard, bitter years they had been. At first she had tried to reform her husband's untidy habits and to correct his English, but he only laughed at her