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Snawdor was willing to part with, but Uncle Jed donated a battered stove, which despite its rust-eaten top and sagging door, still proclaimed itself a "Little Jewel". No bride, adorning her first abode, ever arranged her possessions with more enthusiasm than did Nance. She scrubbed the rough floor, washed the windows, and polished the "Little Jewel" until it shone.
But then Miss Stanley wouldn't have approved of Mr. Demry and his dope, or Mrs. Snawdor and her beer, or Mag Gist, with her loud voice and coarse jokes. When one lives in Calvary Alley, one has to compromise; it is seldom the best or the next best one can afford, even in friends. When Mrs. Snawdor heard that Nance had quit work, she was furious.
Snawdor, shirking hers to her children? Was Mac, adored and petted and protected, any better than Birdie, now in the state asylum paying the penalty of their joint misdeed? Was the tragedy in the great house back of her any more poignant than the tragedy of Dan Lewis bound by law to an insane wife and burdened with a child that was not his own?
"Oh, shut up!" said Mrs. Snawdor, unfeelingly; "it ain't yer lack of work that gits on my nerves; it's yer bein' 'round. I'd pay anybody a quarter a week to keep yer busy!" Nance, during this exchange of conjugal infelicities, assisted by Lobelia and Fidy, was rescuing sufficient dishes from the kitchen sink to serve for the evening meal.
You kin just tell that old maid Stanley that when she's had three husbands and five children an' a step, an' managed to live on less'n ten dollars a week, it'll be time enough fer her to be learnin' me tricks!" "But don't all this mess ever get on your nerves? Don't you ever want to clear out and go to the country?" asked Nance. "Not me!" said Mrs. Snawdor.
It was bad enough, God knew, to have Snawdor settin' around like a tombstone, an' Fidy a-havin' a fit if you so much as looked at her, without havin' Nance eatin' 'em out of house an' home an' not bringin' in a copper cent. If she stayed at home, she'd have to do the work; that was all there was to it! "Anybody'd think jobs happened around as regerlar as the rent man," she ended bitterly.
But love had to do with sweethearts and dime novels and plays on the stage. How could God be that? Maybe it meant the kind of love Mr. Demry had for his little daughter, or the love that Dan had for his mother, or the love she had for the Snawdor baby that died. Maybe the love that was good was God, and the love that was bad was the devil, maybe
"There's Dan!" cried Mrs. Snawdor, and Nance looked eagerly in the direction indicated. In the red glare of the furnace, a big, awkward, bare-armed young fellow was just turning to roll his red-hot ball on a board. There was a steady look in the gray eyes that scowled slightly under the intense glare, a sure movement of the hands that dropped the elongated roll into the mold. When he saw Mrs.
Against the jeers of the boys he could register vows of future vengeance and console himself with the promise of bloody retribution; but against the endless queries and insinuations of his adult neighbors, he was utterly defenseless. "Looks like she had ever'thing fer the parlor, an' nothin' fer the kitchen," observed Mrs. Snawdor from her third-story window to Mrs.
"Wel he ain't tellin' me anything' I don't know," said Mrs. Snawdor, "but I ain't goin' to put her away, not if she th'ows a fit a minute!" It was not maternal solicitude alone that prompted this declaration. The State allowed seventy-live dollars a year to parents of epileptic children, and Mrs. Snawdor had found Fidy a valuable asset.
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