“She’s a sassy girl, Hanna.  Your John a deacon and hers lies molderin’ in his grave, a sui—­”

Mrs. Scogin Bevins flung herself up, then, a wave of red riding up her face.

“If you don’t go up—­if you—­don’t!  Go—­now!  Honest, you’re gettin’ so luny you need a keeper.  Go—­you hear?”

The door shut slowly, inclosing the old figure.  She relaxed to the couch, trying to laugh.

“Luny!” she said.  “Bats!  Nobody home!”

“I like your hair like that, Kittie.  It looks swell.”

“It’s easy.  I’ll fix it for you some time.  It’s the vampire swirl.  All the girls are wearing it.”

“Remember the night, Kit, we was singin’ duets for the Second Street Presbyterian out at Grody’s Grove and we got to hair-pullin’ over whose curls was the longest?”

“Yeh.  I had on a blue dress with white polka-dots.”

“That was fifteen years ago.  Remember Joe Claiborne promised us a real stage-job, and we opened a lemonade-stand on our front gate to pay his commission in advance?”

They laughed back into the years.

“O Lord! them was days!  Seems to me like fifty years ago.”

“Not to me, Kittie.  You’ve done things with your life since then.  I ’ain’t.”

“You know what I’ve always told you about yourself, Hanna.  If ever there was a fool girl, that was Hanna Long.  Lord! if I’m where I am on my voice, where would you be?”

“I was a fool.”

“I could have told you that the night you came running over to tell me.”

“There was no future in this town for me, Kit.  Stenoggin’ around from one office to another.  He was the only real provider ever came my way.”

“I always say if John Burkhardt had shown you the color of real money!  But what’s a man to-day on just a fair living?  Not worth burying yourself in a dump like this for.  No, sirree.  When I married Ed, anyways I thought I smelled big money.  I couldn’t see ahead that his father’d carry out his bluff and cut him off.  But what did you have to smell—­a feed-yard in a hole of a town!  What’s the difference whether you live in ten rooms like yours or in four like this as long as you’re buried alive?  A girl can always do that well for herself after she’s took big chances.  You could be Lord knows where now if you’d ‘a’ took my advice four years ago and lit out when I did.”

“I know it, Kit.  God knows I’ve eat out my heart with knowin’ it!  Only—­only it was so hard—­a man givin’ me no more grounds than he does.  What court would listen to his stillness for grounds?  I ’ain’t got grounds.”

“Say, you could ‘a’ left that to me.  My little lawyer’s got a factory where he manufactures them.  He could ‘a’ found a case of incompatibility between the original turtle-doves.”

“God!  His stillness, Kittie—­like—­”

“John Burkhardt would give me the razzle-dazzle jimjams overnight, he would.  That face reminds me of my favorite funeral.”