When she meant to be entertaining and agreeable, she nodded her head
incessantly and snapped her eyes at one. Her teeth were long and curved,
like a horse's; people said babies always cried if she smiled at them. Her
face had a kind of fascination for me: it was the very colour and shape of
anger. There was a gleam of something akin to insanity in her full,
intense eyes. She was formal in manner, and made calls in rustling,
steel-grey brocades and a tall bonnet with bristling aigrettes.
Mrs. Cutter painted china so assiduously that even her wash-bowls and
pitchers, and her husband's shaving-mug, were covered with violets and
lilies. Once, when Cutter was exhibiting some of his wife's china to a
caller, he dropped a piece. Mrs. Cutter put her handkerchief to her lips
as if she were going to faint and said grandly: `Mr. Cutter, you have
broken all the Commandments--spare the finger-bowls!'
They quarrelled from the moment Cutter came into the house until they went
to bed at night, and their hired girls reported these scenes to the town at
large. Mrs. Cutter had several times cut paragraphs about unfaithful
husbands out of the newspapers and mailed them to Cutter in a disguised
handwriting. Cutter would come home at noon, find the mutilated journal in
the paper-rack, and triumphantly fit the clipping into the space from which
it had been cut.
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