The Federners had never seemed to feel it wrong in Anna, her devotion to this friend and her care of her and of her children.  Mrs. Lehntman and Anna and her feelings were all somehow too big for their attack.  But Mrs. Federner had the mind and tongue that blacken things.  Not really to blacken black, of course, but just to roughen and to rub on a little smut.  She could somehow make even the face of the Almighty seem pimply and a little coarse, and so she always did this with her friends, though not with the intent to interfere.

This was really true with Mrs. Lehntman that Mrs. Federner did not mean to interfere, but Anna’s friendship with the Drehtens was a very different matter.

Why should Mrs. Drehten, that poor common working wife of a man who worked for others in a brewery and who always drank too much, and was not like a thrifty, decent german man, why should that Mrs. Drehten and her ugly, awkward daughters be getting presents from her husband’s sister all the time, and her husband always so good to Anna, and one of the girls having her name too, and those Drehtens all strangers to her and never going to come to any good?  It was not right for Anna to do so.

Mrs. Federner knew better than to say such things straight out to her husband’s fiery, stubborn sister, but she lost no chance to let Anna feel and see what they all thought.

It was easy to blacken all the Drehtens, their poverty, the husband’s drinking, the four big sons carrying on and always lazy, the awkward, ugly daughters dressing up with Anna’s help and trying to look so fine, and the poor, weak, hard-working sickly mother, so easy to degrade with large dosings of contemptuous pity.

Anna could not do much with these attacks for Mrs. Federner always ended with, “And you so good to them Anna all the time.  I don’t see how they could get along at all if you didn’t help them all the time, but you are so good Anna, and got such a feeling heart, just like your brother, that you give anything away you got to anybody that will ask you for it, and that’s shameless enough to take it when they ain’t no relatives of yours.  Poor Mrs. Drehten, she is a good woman.  Poor thing it must be awful hard for her to have to take things from strangers all the time, and her husband spending it on drink.  I was saying to Mrs. Lehntman, Anna, only yesterday, how I never was so sorry for any one as Mrs. Drehten, and how good it was for you to help them all the time.”

All this meant a gold watch and chain to her god daughter for her birthday, the next month, and a new silk umbrella for the elder sister.  Poor Anna, and she did not love them very much, these relatives of hers, and they were the only kin she had.

Mrs. Lehntman never joined in, in these attacks.  Mrs. Lehntman was diffuse and careless in her ways, but she never worked such things for her own ends, and she was too sure of Anna to be jealous of her other friends.