We did live in
feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it,
Martha--at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those
the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one
cranked around by hand!
"Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand
dollars at my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret.
Only the four of us knew. And while I sewed my cheap holokus on
that crazy machine, he bought land with the money--the upper Nahala
lands, you know--a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven
bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala
Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.
"But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had
crushed me in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with
me five minutes from his own business or from his fidelity to his
employers! Sometimes I could have screamed, or showered the
eternal bowl of hot porridge into his face, or smashed the sewing
machine upon the floor and danced a hula on it, just to make him
burst out and lose his temper and be human, be a brute, be a man of
some sort instead of a grey, frozen demi-god.
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