“Heat some water, quick,” said she to Andrew, “and get me a wash-tub.”

Then she told Fanny to brew a mess of sage tea, and began stripping off Amabel’s clothes.

“Let me alone!  Mamma, mamma, mamma!” shrieked the child.  She fought and clawed like a little, wild animal, but the old woman, in whose arms great strength could still arise for emergencies, and in whose spirit great strength had never died, got the better of her.

When Amabel’s clothing was stripped off, and her little, spare body, which was brown rather than rosy, although she was a blonde, was revealed, she was as pitiful to see as a wound.  Every nerve and pulse in that tiny frame, about which there was not an ounce of superfluous flesh, seemed visible.  The terrible sensitiveness of the child appeared on the surface.  She shrank, and wailed in a low, monotonous tone like a spent animal overtaken by pursuers.  But Mrs. Zelotes put her in the tub of warm water, and held her down, though Amabel’s face, emerging from it, had the expression of a wild thing.

“There, you keep still!” said she, and her voice was tender enough, though the decision of it could have moved an army.

When Amabel had had her hot bath, and had drunk her sage tea by compulsory gulps, and been tucked into Ellen’s bed, her childhood reasserted itself.  Gradually her body and her bodily needs gained the ascendancy over the unnatural strain of her mind.  She fell asleep, and lay like one dead.  Then Ellen crept down-stairs, though it was almost midnight, where her father and mother and grandmother were still talking over the matter.  Fanny seemed almost as bad as her sister.  It was evident that there was in the undisciplined Loud family a dangerous strain if too far pressed.  She was lying down on the lounge, with Andrew holding her hand.

“Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Poor Eva!” she kept repeating.

Then she threw off Andrew’s hand, sprang to her feet, and began to walk the room.

“She’ll be as bad as her sister if she keeps on,” said Mrs. Zelotes, quite audibly, but Fanny paid no attention to that.

“What is goin’ to be done?  Oh, my God, what is goin’ to be done?” she wailed.  “There she is locked up with two men watchin’ her lest she do herself a harm, and it’s got to cost eighteen dollars a week, unless she’s put in with the State poor, and then nobody knows how she’ll be treated.  Oh, poor Eva, poor Eva!  Albert Riggs told me there were awful things done with the State poor in the asylums.  He’s been an attendant in one.  He says we’ve got to pay eighteen dollars a week if we want to have her cared for decently, and where’s the money comin’ from?” Fanny raised her voice higher still.

“Where’s the money comin’ from?” she demanded, with an impious inflection.  It was as if she questioned that which is outside of, and the source of, life.  Everything with this woman, whose whole existence had been bound and tainted by the need of money, resolved itself into that fundamental question.  All her woes hinged upon it; even her misery was deteriorated by mammon.