She had come out with a blue handkerchief tied over her head, but she had torn it off, and waved it like a flag of battle in one fat, muscular hand as she lifted on high her voice of musical wrath.  She spoke good English, although naturally tinctured by the abuses of the country-side.  She had come to America before she could talk at all, and all her training had been in the country.  The only trace of her German descent was in the sounds of certain letters, especially d and v.  She said t for d, and f for v.  Carroll noticed that as he noticed every detail.  His senses seemed unnaturally acute, as possibly any animal’s may be when at bay, and when the baiting has fairly begun.

A little behind Minna Eddy, and at her right, stood her husband, with a face of utter discomfiture and terror.  Now and then he reached out a small, twitching hand and made an ineffectual clutch at her elbow as she talked on.  At times he rolled terrified and appealing eyes at Carroll.  He seemed even to be begging for his partisanship, although the absurdity of that was obvious.

“Oh, you other man,” his eyes seemed to say, “see how terrible a woman can be!  What can we do against such might as this?” The room was quite full of people, but Minna Eddy had the platform.

“You, you, you!” she repeated before every paragraph of invective, like a prelude and refrain.  “You, you, you!” and she fairly hurled the words at Carroll—­“you, you, you! gettin’ my man”—­with a fierce backward lunge of her bare right elbow towards her husband, who shrank away, and a fierce backward roll of a blue eye—­“gettin’ my man to take all his money and spend it for no goot.  You, you, you!  When I haf need of it for shoes and stockings for the children, when I go with my dress in rags.  You, you, you!” She went on and on, with a curious variety in the midst of monotony.  The stream of her invective flowed on like a river with ever-new ripples.  There was a species of fascination in it for the man who was the object of it, and there seemed to be also a compelling quality for the others in the room.  There had been no preconcerted movement among Carroll’s creditors, but a number of them had that evening descended upon him in a body.  In the parlor were the little dressmaker; the druggist; the butcher; Tappan, the milkman; the two stenographers, and Harrison Day, the clerk, who had come on the seven-o’clock train from New York; two men with whom he had dealings in a horse-trade; an old man who had made the garden the previous spring; and another butcher who had driven over from New Sanderson.  In the dining-room door stood Marie, the Hungarian maid, and behind her was the coachman.  Carroll stood leaning against the corner of the mantel-piece; some of the others were defiantly yet deprecatingly seated, some were standing.  Anna Carroll, quite pale, with an odd, fixed expression, stood near her brother.  When Charlotte entered