The Angry Wife Read Online Free PDF

it’s so silly! Besides, how are we going to know? I always give Georgia my old dresses, and she eats the leftovers in the pantry—she and Bettina—they don’t eat in the kitchen. How are we going to count all that? I’d rather just give her pin money.”
    “Have you asked her what she’d rather have?” he asked.
    Lucinda frowned and shrugged her shoulders under her lace sack. “I don’t think Georgia would know.”
    Georgia came in again, this time with a plate of ham, sliced thin, to go with the scrambled eggs and kidneys.
    “Well, ask her,” Pierce said with sudden firmness. But Lucinda pressed her small red lips together firmly and ignored him and he was angry. The army had spoiled him for being ignored. Men had obeyed him to the tune of hundreds and he was not to be disobeyed at home.
    “Georgia!” he said abruptly. She looked at him, half alarmed, and he saw into her black eyes, eyes so great and deep that he felt uncomfortable again. “Do you want to be paid wages?”
    She answered, faltering. “Yes, sir, I do if you say so—”
    “Georgia, you may leave the room,” Lucinda said sharply.
    The girl disappeared from where she stood as though she had not been.
    “You shouldn’t frighten her, Luce,” Pierce said.
    “You shouldn’t interfere between me and my maid, Pierce,” Lucinda replied.
    Then they thought of the children and fell into silence. Pierce ate heavily and in great bites, champing his jaws, his eyes on his plate. Lucinda was full of graceful movement She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, buttered a bit of the beaten biscuit split on her plate and she tucked in the end of Carey’s napkin into his neck. Between these feather soft motions of hands and arms, between the turns of her head and the lifting and lowering of her lids, she watched Pierce.
    He threw down his napkin. “I’m going to see for myself how Tom is this morning,” he said abruptly.
    “Do,” Lucinda said pleasantly. “And tell him I’ll be in as soon as I have the children settled.”
    He opened the door into his brother’s room and the weight moved from his bosom. He had been away from women too long. It was going to take time to get used to them again, even to Lucinda. There was something secret about women living in a house when a man had been living in the open with men. He looked at Tom warmly.
    “Why, you’re looking wonderful, Tom,” he said. “Great goodness, man, I didn’t know what you were yesterday—a scarecrow!”
    Tom was lying against fresh pillows, his hair brushed, his nightshirt immaculately white. Bettina was folding a tartan shawl over his shoulders.
    “I feel—good,” Tom said. His voice was faint enough but stronger than it had been yesterday.
    “And you slept?”
    “Without waking—”
    Pierce sat down in the armchair by the bed. “Tom, you talk differently—more like the Yankees.”
    “I’ve heard nothing but Yankees—except the prison guards.”
    Pierce looked grave. His handsome face, always quick to show his feelings, fell into lines of concern. “Tom, did you know the names of any of those sons of bitches? I’ll challenge any man of them we know.”
    Tom shook his head. “They had it in for me—because I’m from the South. They treated me worse than a Yankee.”
    “Probably did,” Pierce said. “I feared for you. First I heard you were dead, Tom. Then I got word you were a prisoner. I moved heaven and earth, of course, but I couldn’t break through.”
    “They had it in for me,” Tom said again slowly. “From the top down—not the slightest favor.”
    “Tom, did they—hurt you?”
    “Yes,” Tom said. He paused as though he would not go on and then the words burst out of him in a retch. “They whipped us, starved us—more of us died than were lost at the front. Pierce, you know how many men Grant lost? I mean from the Wilderness to the James River—I tell you it wasn’t anything to what we lost last July and August—in Andersonville—the awful