It was still a little wet on the edges and she rubbed it off a long time on the inside of her dress, and in between she wondered and looked at the finger and thought, was it really poison that she had just tasted.

“Ain’t it too bad, Nellie, Lena should have sucked that,” Mary said.

Nellie smiled and did not answer.  Nellie was dark and thin, and looked Italian.  She had a big mass of black hair that she wore high up on her head, and that made her face look very fine.

Nellie always smiled and did not say much, and then she would look at Lena to perplex her.

And so they all three sat with their little charges in the pleasant sunshine a long time.  And Lena would often look at her finger and wonder if it was really poison that she had just tasted and then she would rub her finger on her dress a little harder.

Mary laughed at her and teased her and Nellie smiled a little and looked queerly at her.

Then it came time, for it was growing cooler, for them to drag together the little ones, who had begun to wander, and to take each one back to its own mother.  And Lena never knew for certain whether it was really poison, that green stuff that she had tasted.

During these four years of service, Lena always spent her Sundays out at the house of her aunt, who had brought her four years before to Bridgepoint.

This aunt, who had brought Lena, four years before, to Bridgepoint, was a hard, ambitious, well meaning, german woman.  Her husband was a grocer in the town, and they were very well to do.  Mrs. Haydon, Lena’s aunt, had two daughters who were just beginning as young ladies, and she had a little boy who was not honest and who was very hard to manage.

Mrs. Haydon was a short, stout, hard built, german woman.  She always hit the ground very firmly and compactly as she walked.  Mrs. Haydon was all a compact and well hardened mass, even to her face, reddish and darkened from its early blonde, with its hearty, shiny cheeks, and doubled chin well covered over with the up roll from her short, square neck.

The two daughters, who were fourteen and fifteen, looked like unkneaded, unformed mounds of flesh beside her.

The elder girl, Mathilda, was blonde, and slow, and simple, and quite fat.  The younger, Bertha, who was almost as tall as her sister, was dark, and quicker, and she was heavy, too, but not really fat.

These two girls the mother had brought up very firmly.  They were well taught for their position.  They were always both well dressed, in the same kinds of hats and dresses, as is becoming in two german sisters.  The mother liked to have them dressed in red.  Their best clothes were red dresses, made of good heavy cloth, and strongly trimmed with braid of a glistening black.  They had stiff, red felt hats, trimmed with black velvet ribbon, and a bird.  The mother dressed matronly, in a bonnet and in black, always sat between her two big daughters, firm, directing, and repressed.