This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation.

She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, “You ain’t seen what I’ve seen.”

I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly.  “Why, was it as bad as that paper said?” I asked.

She laid her hand on my arm, “Child, it was nothing like what the paper said...it was so much worse!”

“Oh ...”  I commented inadequately.

“I was five days looking for her...they’d moved from the address the paper give.  And, in those five days, I saw so many others..._so many others_...” her face twitched.  She put one lean old hand before her eyes.  Then, quite unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and superficial.  “Jombatiste is right!” she cried to me with a bitter fierceness:  “Everything is wrong!  Everything is wrong!  If I can do anything, I’d ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up and start over!  What good does it do for me to bring up here just these three out of all I saw ...”  Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing quavers, “but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first thing ... this morning he wouldn’t pick up his new rubbers off the floor for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and ’twan’t her fault either!  She’s ... why she’s like anybody ... like a person’s cousin they never happened to see before ...why, they were all folks!” she cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to another.

“You didn’t find the little boy in the asylum?” I asked.

“He was dead before I got there,” she answered.

“Oh ... !” I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, “Had he ...?”

“I don’t know whether he had or not,” said Cousin Tryphena, “I didn’t ask.  I didn’t want to know.  I know too much now!” She looked up fixedly at the mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky.  “Jombatiste is right,” she said again unsparingly, “I hadn’t ought to be enjoying them ... their father ought to be alive and with them.  He was willing to work all he could, and yet he ... here I’ve lived for fifty-five years and never airned my salt a single day.  What was I livin’ on?  The stuff these folks ought to ha’ had to eat ... them and the Lord only knows how many more besides!  Jombatiste is right ... what I’m doin’ now is only a drop in the bucket!”