it from his mother she supposed; he wa’an’t to blame, really.  But she hoped Addie and Ralph would be like her folks.  Not but what the Powerses were good-hearted enough.  ’Gene was a good man, if he was queer, and an awful good papa to Addie and Ralph and little ’Gene.  None of her sisters had got a man half so good.  That sprigged dress would look good with feather-stitching around the hem, too.  Why hadn’t she thought of that before?  She hadn’t got enough mercerized thread in the house, she didn’t believe, to do it all; and it was such a nuisance to run out of the thread you had to have, and nobody going to the village for goodness knows when, with the farmwork behind the way it was, on account of the rains.

She shifted her position and happened to bring one of her feet into view.  Without disturbing a single beat of the regular rhythm of the dasher, she tilted her head to look at it with approbation.  If there was one thing she was particular about it was her shoes.  She took such comfort in having them nice.  They could say what they pleased, folks could, but high heels suited her feet.  Maybe some folks, that had great broad feet like that old Indian Toucle, felt better in those awful, sloppy old gunboats they called “Common-sense shoes,” but she didn’t!  It would make her sick to wear them!  How they did look!  Was there anything so pretty, anyhow, as a fine-leather shoe with a nice pointed toe, and a pretty, curved-in heel?  It made you feel refined, and as good as anybody, even if you had on a calico dress with it.  That was another nice thing about ’Gene, how he’d stand up for her about wearing the kind of shoes she wanted.  Let anybody start to pick on her about it, if ’twas his own mother, he’d shut ’em up short, and say Nelly could wear what she liked he guessed.  Even when the doctor had said so strict that she hadn’t ought to wear them in the time before the babies came, ’Gene never said a word, when he saw her doing it.

There, the butter was just almost there.  She could hear the buttermilk begin to swash!  She turned her head to call to her mother-in-law to bring a pitcher for the buttermilk, when a sound of galloping hoofs echoed from the road.  Nelly frowned, released her hold on the dasher, listened an instant, and ran into the house.  She went right upstairs to her room as provoked as she could be.  Well, she would make the bed and do the room-work anyhow, so’s not to waste all that time.  She’d be that much ahead, anyhow.  And as soon as Frank had finished chinning with Mother Powers, and had gone, she’d go back and finish her churning.  She felt mad all through at the thought of that cream left at just the wrong minute, just as it was separating.  Suppose Frank hung round and hung around, the way he did often, and the sun got higher and the cream got too warm, and she’d have to put in ice, and go down cellar with it, and fuss over it all the rest of the day?  She was furious and thumped the