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She withdrew into the sun-bonnet, muttering to herself. She could not be more than fifty, Mary thought, but her habit of muttering and exhibiting her depopulated gums while she was in the act of revivifying the snuff-brush gave her a cronish aspect. A babel of voices came from the open-faced room on the opposite side of the house corresponding to the one in which Mary and Mrs. Rodney were sitting.
But though down, Sally was by no means out, and after a brief session with the snuff-brush she returned to the field prepared to maintain that the Yellett children, for all their pampering in the matter of having a governess imported for their benefit, were no better off than her own brood, who had taken the learning the gods provided.
The snuff-brush, newly replenished from the tin box, kept perfect time to the motion of the chair. With the lady of the house it was one of the brief seasons of passing content vouchsafed by an ample meal and a good digestion. Warren Rodney took down a gun from the wall and began to clean it.
Rodney now put a foot on the round of an adjoining chair and shoved it towards Mary Carmichael in hospitable pantomime, never once relaxing her continual rocking the meantime. Mary took the chair, and Mrs. Rodney, after freshening up the snuff-brush from a small, tin box in her lap, put spurs to her rocking-chair, so to speak, and started off at a brisk canter.
From the corner of her mouth protruded a snuff-brush, so constantly in this accustomed place that it had come to be regarded by members of her family as part and parcel of her attire—the first thing assumed in the morning, the last thing laid aside at night.
"Laws a massy!" she continued, reminiscently, working her toothless jaw to free it from an escaped splinter from the snuff-brush. "When me an’ paw war keepin’ comp’ny, satin warn’t good enough for me. He lowed I wuz to have half creation. Sence we wuz married he ’ain’t never found time, endurin’ all these years, to build me a bird-house."
The snuff-brush was brought into more fiercely active commission, but she said nothing till Mary Carmichael was within a few inches of her. Then, shifting the snuff-brush to a position more favorable to enunciation, she said: "Howdy? Ye be Miz Yellett’s gov’ment, ain’t ye?"
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