Explore "Galusha the Magnificent" by Joseph C. Lincoln on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
About the Phipps' home hung now the atmosphere of expectancy. It had so hung for several weeks, ever since the first letter to Cousin Gussie had been posted, but now there was in it a different quality, a quality of brightness, of cheer. Martha seemed more like herself, the capable, adequate self which Galusha had met when he staggered into that house out of the rain and wind of his first October night on Cape Cod. She was more talkative, laughed more frequently, and bustled about her work with much, if not all, of her former energy. She, herself, was quite aware of the change and commented upon it rather apologetically in one of her talks with her lodger.
"It's ridiculous," she said, "and I know it, but I can't help it. I'm as excited as a child and almost as sure everything is goin' to come out right as -- well, as Primmie is. I wasn't so at all in the beginnin'; when we first sent that letter to your cousin I didn't think there was much more than one chance in a thousand that he would take any interest in Wellmouth Development stock. But since you got back from your Boston cruise, Mr. Bangs, I've felt altogether different. What the Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot folks said wasn't any too definite; when I sit right down and think about it I realize it wasn't. But it was encouraging, real encouraging. And that bit of real encouragement has made me over, like an old dress. Which reminds me that I've got to be makin' over some of MY old dresses pretty soon, or summer'll be here and I won't have a thing fit to wear. I declare," she added, with a laugh, "this is the first time I've even thought about clothes since last fall. And when a woman forgets to be interested in dressmakin' she's pretty far gone. Why, what makes you look so sorrowful? Is anything wrong?"