“You are a good-for-nothin' girl,” she said. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“What do you mean, mother?” asked Sarah. She stood fair and white, confronting her mother, who was burning and coarse with wrath.
“You talk about things you and him know that the rest of us can't talk about. You take advantage because your father and me sent you to school where you could learn more than we could. It wasn't my fault I didn't go to school, and 'twa'n't his fault, poor man. He had to go to work and get all that money he has.” By the last masculine pronoun Mrs. Lynn meant John Mangam.
Sarah had a spirit of her own, and she turned upon her mother, and for the time the two faces looked alike, being swayed with one emotion. “If,” she said, “Mr. Ware and I had to regulate our conversation in order to enable Mr. Mangam to talk with us, I am sure I don't know what we could say. Mr. Mangam never talks, anyway.”
“It ain't always the folks that talks that knows the most and is the best,” said Mrs. Lynn. Then her face upon her daughter's turned malevolent, triumphant, and cruel. “I wa'n't goin' to tell you what I heard when I was in Mis' Ketchum's this afternoon,” she said. “I thought at first I wouldn't, but now I'm goin' to.”
“What do you mean, mother?” asked Sarah, in an angry voice; but she quailed.
“I thought at first I wouldn't,” her mother continued, pitilessly, “but I see to-night how things are goin'.”
“I see that you are fool enough to get to likin' a man that has got the gift of the gab, and that you think is good-lookin', and that wears clothes made in the city, better than a good honest feller that we have all known about ever since he was born, and that ain't got no outlandish blood in him, neither.”
“You needn't say mother that way. I ain't a fool, if I haven't been to school like some folks, and I see the way you two looked at each other to-night right before that poor man that has been comin' here steady and means honorable.”
“Nobody asked or wanted him to come,” said Sarah.
“Maybe you'll change your mind when you hear what I've got to tell you. And I'm goin' to tell you. _Hyacinthus Ware has got a woman livin' over there in that house._” Sarah turned ghastly pale, but she spoke firmly. “You mean he is married?” she said.