pillows hard, with her doubled-up fist.  But if she went down, Frank’d hang around worse, and talk so foolish she’d want to slap him.  He wa’n’t more’n half-witted, sometimes, she thought.  What was the matter with men, anyhow?  They didn’t seem to have as much sense as so many calves!  You’d think Frank would think up something better to do than to bother the life out of busy folks, sprawling around all over creation the way he did.  But she never had any luck!  Before Frank it had been that old Mrs. Hewitt, nosing around to see what she could pick fault with in a person’s housekeeping, looking under the sink if you left her alone in the kitchen for a minute, and opening your dresser drawers right before your face and eyes.  Well, Frank was getting to be most as much of a nuisance.  He didn’t peek and snoop the way Mrs. Hewitt did, but he bothered; and he was getting so impudent, too!  He had the big-head because he was the best dancer in the valley, that was what was the matter with him, and he knew she liked to dance with him.  Well, she did.  But she would like to dance with anybody who danced good.  If ’Gene didn’t clump so with his feet, she’d love to dance with him.  And Frank needn’t think he was so much either.  That city man who was staying with the old man next to the Crittendens was just as good a dancer as Frank, just exactly as light on his feet.  She didn’t like him a bit.  She thought he was just plain fresh, the way he told Frank to go on dancing with her.  What was it to him!  But she’d dance with him just the same, if she got the chance.  How she just loved to dance!  Something seemed to get into her, when the music struck up.  She hardly knew what she was doing, felt as though she was floating around on that thick, soft moss you walked on when you went blue-berrying on the Burning above the Eagle Rocks . . . all springly. . . .  If you could only dance by yourself, without having to bother with partners, that was what would be nice.

She stepped to the door to listen, and heard ’Gene’s mother cackling away like an old hen.  How she would carry on, with anybody that came along!  She hadn’t never settled down, not a bit really, for all she had been married and was a widow and was old.  It wa’n’t nice to be so lively as that, at her age.  But she wasn’t nice, Mother Powers wasn’t, for all she was good to Addie and Ralph and little ’Gene.  Nelly liked nice people, she thought, as she went back to shake the rag rugs out of the window; refined ladies like Mrs. Bayweather, the minister’s wife.  That was the way she wanted to be, and have little Addie grow up.  She lingered at the window a moment looking up at the thick dark branches of the big pine.  How horrid it was to have that great tree so close to the house!  It shaded the bedroom so that there was a musty smell no matter how much it was aired.  And the needles dropped down so messy too, and spoiled the grass.

Frank’s voice came up the stairs, bold, laughing, “Nelly, Nelly, come down here a minute.  I want to ask you something!”