"A rich old sport you are, eh?" he would say, grinning. "Getting yourself
discussed by women and college professors in clubs, eh? You old fraud!"
Toward Mary Underwood, the school teacher who had become Sam's friend and
with whom the boy sometimes walked and talked, Telfer had no charity. Mary
Underwood was a sort of cinder in the eyes of Caxton. She was the only
child of Silas Underwood, the town harness maker, who once had worked in a
shop belonging to Windy McPherson. After the business failure of Windy he
had started independently and for a time did well, sending his daughter to
a school in Massachusetts. Mary did not understand the people of Caxton
and the people misunderstood and distrusted her. Taking no part in the
life of the town and keeping to herself and to her books she awoke a kind
of fear in others. Because she did not join them at church suppers, or go
from porch to porch gossiping with other women through the long summer
evenings, they thought her something abnormal. On Sundays she sat alone in
her pew at church and on Saturday afternoons, come storm, come sunshine,
she walked on country roads and through the woods accompanied by a collie
dog. She was a small woman with a straight, slender figure and had fine
blue eyes filled with changing lights, hidden by the eye-glasses she
almost constantly wore.
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