Mrs. Lawton was of the fat but energetic variety.  She fairly shone with cleanliness and with an insistent determination to keep busy.  You could see that all the time her tongue was uttering polite platitudes concerning the weather, her mind was hovering like a dragon fly over this or that flower of domestic economy.  She was one of the women who carry their housekeeping to a perfection uncomfortable both to herself and everybody else, and then delude themselves into the martyrlike belief that she is doing it all entirely for others.  As a consequence, she exhibited much of the time an aggrieved air that comported but ludicrously with her tendency to bustle.  And it must be confessed that in other ways Mrs. Lawton was ludicrous.  Her dumpy little form was dressed in the loudest of prints, the figures of which turned her into a huge flower bed of brilliant cabbage-like blooms.  Over this chaos of colours peered her round little face with its snapping eyes.  She discoursed in sentences which began coherently, but frayed out soon into nothingness under the stress of inner thought.  “I don’t see where that husban’ of mine is.  I reckon you’ll think we’re just awful rude, Mr. de Laney, and that gal, an’ Maude.  I declare it’s jest enough to try any one’s patience, it surely is.  You’ve no idea, Mr. de Laney, what with the hens settin’, and this mis’able dry spell that sends th’ dust all over everything and every one ‘way behin’ hand on everythin’——­” Her eye was becoming vacant as she wondered about certain biscuits.

“I’m sure it must be,” agreed Bennington uncomfortably.

“What was I a-sayin’?  You must excuse me, Mr. de Laney, but you, being a man, can have no idea of the life us poor women folks lead, slavin’ our very lives away to keep things runnin’, and then no thanks fer it a’ter all.  I’d just like t’ see Bill Lawton try it fer jest one week.  He’d be a ravin’ lunatic, an’ thet I tell him often.  This country’s jest awful, too.  I tell him he must get out sometimes, and I ’spect he will, when he’s made his pile, poor man, an’ then we’ll have a chanst to go back East again.  When we lived East, Mr. de Laney, we had a house—­not like this little shack; a good house with nigh on to a dozen rooms, and I had a gal to help me and some chanst to buy things once in a while, but now that Bill Lawton’s moved West, what’s goin’ to become o’ me I don’t know.  I’m nigh wore out with it all.”

“Then you lived East once?” asked Bennington.

“Law, yes!  We lived in Illinoy once, and th’ Lord only knows I wisht we lived there yet, though the farmin’ was a sight of work and no pay sometimes.”  The inner doubts as to the biscuits proved too much for her.  “Heaven knows, you ain’t t’ git much to eat,” she cried, jumping up, “but you ain’t goin’ to git anythin’ a tall if I don’t run right off and tend to them biscuit.”