t. Rose is just like her--she's all taffy now on
that young man, but in a little spell she'll clamp down on him."

Gordon had a swift vision of Lettice sharpening with the years; there
sounded in prospect on his ear an endless roll of acidulous remarks,
accompanied by the fretful whine of children, intensified by Mrs. Caley's
lowering silence. He thought of the change that had overtaken his sister
Effie, remarked by her husband, the change from a trim, upright figure to
the present stooped form, the turning of that voice brimming with song to
a continuous, shrill troubling.

The cool, disdainful countenance of Meta Beggs returned to him: time, he
divined, would not mark her in so sorry a fashion; to the last she would
remain slimly rounded, graceful; her hands, like magnolia flowers, would
never thicken and grow rough. He thought of Paris, of that life which, she
said, would civilize him; he tried in vain to form an image of the cafes
and little carriages, the bare-necked women drinking champagne. He
recalled a burlesque show he had once seen in Stenton, called "The French
Widows"; the revealed amplitude of the "widows" had been clad in vivid,
stained pink tights; the scene in which they disported with a comic
Irishman, a lugubrious Jew, was set with gilded palms, a saloon bar on one
side and a tank on the other from which "Venus" rose flatly from a cotton
sea. He dismissed that possibility of resemblance--it was too palpably at
variance with what Meta Beggs would consider desirable; but, somehow, pink
tights and Paris were synonymous in his thoughts. At any rate it was
certain to be gay; the women would resemble Nickles' wife rather than his
sister ... than Lettice as she would be in a few years.

He recalled suddenly a neglected rite of hospitality, and from an obscure
angle of the shed, produced a gallon jug. Drinking vessels were procured,
and a pale, pungent whiskey poured out. Rutherford Berry sputtered and
gasped over his glass; Sim Caley absorbed a brimming measure between
breaths, without a wink of the eye; Gordon drank inattentively. The
ceremony was repeated; a flare of color rose in Berry's pallid
countenance, Sim's portion apparently evaporated from the glass. The
whiskey made no visible impression on Gordon Makimmon. The jug was
circulated again, and again. All at once Rutherford became drunk. He rose
swaying, attempted to articulate, and fell, half in a stall. Simeon Caley
pulled him out, slapped his bac