Mrs. Birdsey's compliments

She went into raptures over everything, Bishop Birdsey's wife did. It was her way. She handed out compliments like they were a cartload of strawberries that were going to spoil on her before she could get them preserved. She gave them away desperately. "Here—you take this—you might be able to get some good out of it before it spoils," her little dark eyes pleaded. After a while these laudations got to be a glut on the market and nobody openly valued them, but Mrs. Birdsey kept on just the same. Something made her do it, perhaps a deep-lying wish to be complimented in return (she never was, nobody thought of such a thing), or a painful need to be thought agreeable by her fellows, a need greater than others were tormented by, maybe, as the ibex needs mountains and the wanderoo needs trees, or if not that, a nervous habit, as some twitch and others jerk.

     It was not a bad habit! It made everybody feel wonderfully good even when they did not believe a word she was saying, or only half or three quarters believed it (for she had too often been heard giving praise where none was deserved). Certainly the Ecklund girls—Myra, too—felt better to hear that they were beautiful, bright, talented and looked nice in their clothes, than if they had heard they were not and didn't, or heard nothing. The thing about Mrs. Birdsey was, though so often giving a compliment when it was ridiculous to do so—as for instance, praising Aglia Parmalee for her good housekeeping, Mrs. Lilygren for her taste in hats and blind old Mr. Ayres for his spruceness—in one's own case, she might possibly be right, or if wrong, not SO wrong as in the case of others. Everybody disdained Mrs. Birdsey's myriad compliments. However, nobody but thought that in his own circumstance there might be a grain—no more than a grain, perhaps, but a grain—of truth in what she said.

     --From Up Home