Poor Laurelia! Were it not that she had a sense of fault under the
scathing arraignment of her motives, her work, and its result, although
she scarcely saw how she was to blame, that she had equally with him
esteemed Leander's standpoint iniquitous, she might have made a better
fight in her own interest. Why she did not renounce the true culprit
as one on whom all godly teachings were wasted, and, adopting the
indisputable vantage-ground of heredity, carry the war into the enemy's
country, ascribing Leander's shortcomings to his Yerby blood, and with
stern and superior joy proclaiming that he was neither kith nor kin of
hers, she wondered afterward, for this valid ground of defence did not
occur to her then. In these long mourning years she had grown dull; her
mental processes were either a sad introspection or reminiscence. Now
she could only take into account her sacrifices of feeling, of time, of
care; the illnesses she had nursed, the garments that she had made and
mended--ah, how many! laid votive on the altar of Leander's vigor and
his agility, for as he scrambled about the crags he seemed, she was wont
to say, to climb straight out of them. The recollection of all this--the
lesser and unspiritual maternal values, perchance, but essential--surged
over her with bitterness; she lost her poise, and fell a-bickering.

"'Precious leetle lam','" she repeated, scornfully. "Precious he mus'
hev been! Fur when ye lef him he hedn't a whole gyarmint ter his back,
an' none but them that kivered him."

Nehemiah Yerby changed color slightly as the taunt struck home, but he
was skilled in the more aesthetic methods of argument.

"We war pore--mighty pore indeed, Sister Sudley."

Now, consciously in the wrong, Sister Sudley, with true feminine
inconsistency, felt better. She retorted with bravado.

"Needle an' thread ain't 'spensive nowhar ez I knows on, an' the
gov'mint hev sot no tax on saaft home-made soap, so far ez hearn from."

She briskly placed her chair, a rude rocker, the seat formed of a
taut-stretched piece of ox-hide, beside the fire, and took up her
knitting. A sock for Leander it was--one of many of all sizes. She
remembered the first that she had measured for the bare pink toes which
he had brought there, forlorn candidates for the comfortable integuments
in which they were presently encased, and how she had morbidly felt that
every stitch she took was a renunciation of her own children, since a
stranger w