As the myriad pros and cons she had weighed and eliminated before inviting her guest passed in quick review before Marcia's mind, she chuckled: "Sometimes I do," she conceded grimly. [40] [40] Chapter IV The village store, grandiloquently styled by a red sign the Wilton Emporium, was thronged with the usual noontime crowd. The It was a still, grey day, murky with fog and the odors of wet oilskins, steaming rubber coats, damp woolens blended with a mixture of tar, coffee and tobacco smoke, made its interior thick and stuffy. Long ago the air-tight stove had consumed such remnants of oxygen as the room contained. The windows reeked with moisture; the floor was gritty with sand. These discomforts, however, failed to be of consequence to the knot of men who, rain or shine, congregated there at mail time. They were accustomed to them. Indeed, a drizzle, far from keeping the habitués away, rendered the meeting place unusually popular. Not but that plenty of work, capable of being performed as well in foul as in fair weather, could not have been found at home. Zenas Henry Brewster's back stairs were at the very moment crying out for paint; the leg was off his hair-cloth sofa; the pantry window stuck; the bolt dangled from his side door and could have been wrenched off with a single pull. Here was an ideal opportunity to make such repairs. Yet, why take today? [41] [41] Nobody really saw the stairs. If the sofa pitched the brick tucked underneath, it at least prevented it from lurching dangerously. The pantry window was as well closed as open, anyway. And as for the side door—if it was not bolted at all, no great harm would result. "Nobody's got in yet," Zenas Henry optimistically philosophized as, despite his wife's protests, he slipped into his sou'wester, "an' I see no cause to think thieves will pitch on today to come. Fur's that goes, Wilton
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