in Winter, Mary had moved her cooking stove into the
dining room, had improvised a calico-curtained cupboard for the
utensils, and there she lived and sewed. The windows were bare.

"I'll let the parlour have curtains if it wants to," she had said, "but
in the room I live in I want every strip of the sun I can get."

There were no plants, though every house in Old Trail Town had a window
of green, and slips without number were offered....

"... You can have flowers all you want," she said once; "I like 'em too
well to box 'em up in the house."

And there were no books.

"I don't read," she admitted; "I ain't ever read a book in my life but
"Pilgrim's Progress" and the first four chapters of "Ben Hur." What's
the use of pretending, when books is such a nuisance to dust?
Grandfather's books in the parlour--oh, they ain't books. They're
furniture."

But she had a little bookcase whose shelves were filled with her
patterns--in her dressmaking she never used a fashion plate.

"I like to make 'em up and cut 'em out," she sometimes told her friends.
"I don't care nothing whatever about the dresses when they get
done--more fool the women for ornamenting themselves up like lamp
shades, I always think. But I just do love to fuss with the paper and
make it do like I say. Land, I've got my cupboard full of more patterns
than I'd ever get orders for if I lived to be born again."

She sat down before the cooking stove and drew off her woolen mittens.
She folded a hand on her cheek, forcing the cheek out of drawing by her
hand's pressure. There was always about her gestures a curious
nakedness--indeed, about her face and hands. They were naive, perfectly
likely to reveal themselves in their current awkwardness and ugliness of
momentary expression which, by its very frankness, made a new law as it
broke an old one.

"Don't you tell folks I've been house cleaning," she warned Jenny. "The
town would think I was crazy, with the thermometer acting up zero so.
Anyway, I ain't been house cleaning. I just simply got so sick to death
of all the truck piled up in this house that I had to get away from it.
And this morning it looked so clean and white and smooth outdoors that I
felt so cluttered up I couldn't sew. I begun on this room--and then I
kept on with the parlour. I've took out the lambrequins and 'leven
pictures and the what-not and four moth-catching rugs and four sofa
pillows, and I've packed the whole lot of 'em into the a