The Misadventures of Maude March Read Online Free Page B

never used us either. Whatever we did, she did just as much.
    “Maybe we should get ourselves taken in by someone who doesn't have so much work to do,” I said.
    “And maybe we'll get taken in by someone worse,” Maude said with a dark look on her face. “They could have separated us.”
    So maybe I shouldn't have held it against the Peasleys that they made good use of us. But I did hold it against them.
    I went in to make up the little children's cots one morning and found they had been, without ever saying one word to us, covered over in Aunt Ruthie's quilts. Worse, these were not her everyday quilts, but the ones that had taken blue ribbons at the fair. I finished my chores with my lips atremble.
    When Mrs. Peasley went out for a minute, I brought Maude to have a look. The matter was not lost on her. “She kept those in her cedar chest at the foot of her bed,” she said. “They're going through all her things.”
    “What are we going to say?” I asked her.
    “Nothing,” Maude said.
    It got to the point where Reverend Peasley would smile on me, and I would turn an upside-down smile with lots of teeth back at him. He'd look at me like his eyes couldn't be trusted and make a deliberate smile. “Sallie? You don't look like yourself. Sallie?”
    And I would smile back just as nice as you please.
    I hoped to wreck his mind.
    It surprised all of us, I think, when the Toleridge boy tried calling on Maude. That is, he would call, and she would shut the door in his face, refusing to see him.
    The reverend wondered if Maude felt it was too soon after Aunt Ruthie's death to think about marriage. He cleared his throat, then said, “Not that I would have you rush intoanything, Miss Maude. But there is the matter of your house. The Toleridge boy…”
    Had enough money to buy it back from the bank. Or his family did. That's what Reverend Peasley was too particular to say.
    “I don't like the Toleridge boy,” Maude told Reverend Peasley. At this, Mrs. Peasley's mouth pinched up like she was sucking on a lemon drop.
    “He never was nice to dogs or cats or even little children in the schoolyard,” Maude went on saying. “He couldn't be trusted. I would never think of marrying the likes of him.”
    “Maude, I thought you would do anything to get the house back,” I said to her that night. We did most of our talking in the dark, in the few minutes between blowing out our candle and falling asleep.
    “I thought so too,” she said. “But that boy is too big a dose of 'anything' for me.”
    “Do you still want the house back?” I asked her, wondering if there weren't some things she'd still want from it. Maude was sentimental that way.
    “I do,” she whispered. “I want it something terrible. I want Aunt Ruthie too.”
    I think it soured the reverend on us a little when Maude turned away the Toleridge boy. I'm not sure why. I only know he started to take a firm tone with us.
    About that time, Mr. Wilburn took to coming to dinner every Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday evening. At first he brought small gifts to Mrs. Peasley. Then he began bringing them to Maude. An embroidered case for her scissors. A silver thimble. A comb for her hair.
    Mr. Wilburn was a grandfatherly sort of man, and I was still of an age when I thought I might like to have a grandfather. Especially one who brought me his already-been-read-twice dime novels, like Mr. Wilburn did, once he learned I liked them. He spared them out, one each week, which was fine by me; it made a Christmas of every Friday evening.
    It took Maude till October to figure out that Mr. Wilburn was sweet on her. “I could never marry that old man,” Maude said to me. “Why, he could be our grandfather.”
    I was sorry to have to be the one to say it, but Maude didn't have all that many charms. Not the kind men are said to go for. Maude was good, she was honest and true. But she was plain. Wren brown hair, ordinary brown eyes, and stick thin from neck to foot. It wasn't likely