had gone out to get a cow, it, was said. Trinette, this time much more
beautifully sulphur-yellow than Elsie had been, strutted around her with
contemptuous mien and turned-up nose, and finally said, "Fie and for
shame, how common you're making yourself! To take up with a servant!
It's a disgrace for the whole family! If my folks had known that my
husband's sister would marry a servant, they'd have given him the mitten
like a flash; they didn't like him any too well as it was; but I was
fool enough to want him absolutely. We can't count you as one of the
family any more, and then you can see where you'll find a roof for your
head; you can't stay here any more--I say this once and for all. Faugh,
to have a love-affair with a servant! You give me the creeps; I can't
bear to look at you any more. Ugh, aren't you ashamed to the bottom of
your soul, and don't you feel like crawling into the ground?"

However, Elsie was not ashamed, but paid Trinette back heartily in her
own coin: a girl could choose anybody she wanted for her sweetheart, and
could marry a servant or a master; all men were alike before God. But if
once she was a wife she'd be ashamed to have her name connected now with
the stable-boy and now with the butcher, now with the herder and now
with the carter, and finally with all the peddlers and traders, and to
have children with no two noses the same and looking as much alike as
Swiss and Italians. But for Freneli and the mother, the two
sisters-in-law would have torn the grass-green and the sulphur-yellow
dresses from each other's bodies. When the mother wanted to help out
Trinette by speaking for her, Elsie became so excited that they had to
put her to bed. Now, she said, when she recovered consciousness and
speech--now she surely would do what she wanted; she wouldn't let
herself be made into sausages like a fat sow; and it was cruel of her
parents to want just one child to inherit and to let the other child
pine away without a husband, just so all the money would stay in one
pile.

Johannes and his wife did not stay long. Turning in frequently on the
homeward road, and giving up all restraint, they spun out at length the
whole story to their friends and colleagues, male and female, and their
story carried the rumor to complete certainty. The brother and his wife
told it themselves, people said, and they ought to know.

Not long afterward Uli drove to market with a horse, but soon saw that
he could not sell