“I figured it that she’d run away and married a handsome, blarneying, good-for-nothing Irishman against her family’s wishes and in the face of all sorts of prophecies about the evil that’d come of it, and seeing as she’d made her bed she was going to lie on it without whining. I’ll bet her folks never knew how things went with her.
“She tried to teach Peggy what she could and the youngster was a good deal like her in some ways—tidy, little mite with pretty ideas about things and lots of pluck. She ain’t a whiner, no more ’n her mother, but it ain’t all plain pluck with Peg. She’s got just the one good thing that her father had to give her, ’n’ that’s cheerfulness. She’s got a disposition like one of them toy balloons, Peg has, and it’s a good thing. If it hadn’t been for that she’d ’a’ been dead, with all the responsibility and want and abuse she’s had to stand.
“She’s too old for her years, of course, and she’s got serious ways and some awfully grown-up thoughts, but she’ll never die of broken heart and broken spirit like her mother did. No, sir. You can’t down Peg. That’s the Irish in her. She’d see something cheerful and encouraging in a smallpox epidemic—’n’ she’d be out nursing the sick ones too. Well, there’s no telling what the man was himself before the drink got him. He was something a fine-souled, big-hearted woman fell in love with, and maybe a better father might have given Peggy something that wasn’t as handy to have around as her cheerfulness.”
“What became of the mother?” Archibald asked. There was a very friendly light in his eyes as he looked into the face beside him. He was going to like this neighbor.
“Oh, she dragged around, getting weaker and weaker and thinner and thinner and whiter and whiter. I’ll say one thing for O’Neill. He never beat her—not even when he was drunk. He didn’t make a living for her and he didn’t raise a hand to help her, the lazy whelp. Chopped her own wood, she did, when Peggy didn’t pick it up in the woods. The neighbors would have helped but they couldn’t do much—didn’t dare. She was so proud she’d rather starve than take charity. You couldn’t even offer it—just had to do what you could in a round-about, happen-so way.
“By and by she took to her bed and then Peggy had to do everything that got done. She surely was a wonder too—waited on her mother hand and foot, and kept things clean and cooked whenever there was anything to cook, and got wood to keep them all warm, and looked after O’Neill as if he was a bad child that she loved even if he was bad.