"That thing, there? No, that's a
woman's love. See, it's blowed away."

"Such nonsense!" said the old woman. "How can you keep it up so long?
I'd get sick to death of it. Woman's love, woman's love--I never was as
tired of hearing of a thing. I hear it all summer, and now you're
talkin' it. Conscience alive, how the wind blows! It makes me think of
old Lewson, the cold made him shiver so. I've knowed him to sit up at
night with his fire out and his teeth chatterin', waitin' for the
spirits to come. One night I asked him who he expected, and he said his
wife, and I told him she was a fool to come out such a night, and he
flung his spirit book at me, and the Dutch girl kindled the fire with it
the next mornin'. Poor old feller! I passed his grave the other day, all
heaped up with snow; and it made me shake so to think I'd be lyin' there
sometime, with the snow fallin' an' the cows mooin' down the road. But
I'm not gone yet, Bill. Do you understand that? I say I'm not gone yet,
and many a one of 'em 'll be hauled off before I do go. Yes, you bet!
I'll outlive all of you; the last one of you."

"I hope so, Mrs. Stuvic," said Milford.

"You do? Thank you for the compliment."

"But you've got to go sometime," Mitchell spoke up; and she frowned upon
him.

"You shut your mouth, now," she snapped. "I wan't talkin' to you. I'll
go when I get ready, and it's none of your business. But ain't it
awful," she added, speaking to Milford, "that we've got to go? And we
don't know where and don't know what'll happen to us afterwards. Lord,
Lord, such a world! If we could only be dead for a while to see what
it's like; but to think forever and ever, all the summers and all the
winters to come! Dead, all the time dead. I wake up in the night, and
think about it and wish I'd never been born. Sometimes I look at my hand
and say, 'Yes, the flesh has got to drop off.' Not long ago a doctor
stopped at my house one night with a skeleton. He was a young fool, and
had bought it somewhere. He jerked the thing around like it was a
jumpin'-jack; and I said to myself, 'You'd do me the same way, you
scoundrel.' And I told him to drive away from there as fast as he could.
And old Lewson's failin' to come back has made it worse. I wonder if he
did lie to me. I wonder if he could come back. And if he could, why
didn't he? I'd always been kind to him; took him when his own flesh and
blood turned him out. Then what made him lie to me? I don't care so m