: The Rise of Roscoe Paine by Lincoln Joseph Crosby - Massachusetts Fiction; Cape Cod (Mass.) Fiction

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Produced by: Donald Lainson

THE RISE OF ROSCOE PAINE

"I'm going up to the village," I told Dorinda, taking my cap from the hook behind the dining-room door.

"What for?" asked Dorinda, pushing me to one side and reaching for the dust-cloth, which also was behind the door.

"Oh, just for the walk," I answered, carelessly.

"Um-hm," observed Dorinda.

"Um-hm" is, I believe, good Scotch for "Yes." I have read that it is, somewhere--in one of Barrie's yarns, I think. I had never been in Scotland, or much of anywhere else, except the city I was born in, and my college town, and Boston--and Cape Cod. "Um-hm" meant yes on the Cape, too, except when Dorinda said it; then it might mean almost anything. When Mother asked her to lower the window shade in the bed-room she said "Um-hm" and lowered it. And, five minutes later, when Lute came in, loaded to the guards with explanations as to why he had forgotten to clean the fish for dinner, she said it again. And the Equator and the North Pole are no nearer alike, so far as temperature is concerned, than those two "Um-hms." And between them she had others, expressing all degrees from frigid to semi-torrid.

Her "Um-hm" this time was somewhere along the northern edge of Labrador.

"It's a good morning for a walk," I said.

"Um-hm," repeated Dorinda, crossing over to Greenland, so to speak.

I opened the outside door. The warm spring sunshine, pouring in, was a pleasant contrast and made me forget, for the moment, the glacier at my back. Come to think of it, "glacier" isn't a good word; glaciers move slowly and that wasn't Dorinda's way.

"What are you going to do?" I asked.

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