ouldn't have worn that dress without any back breadth while she
was living," argued Flora, "but now it don't make any odds. It don't
show."

"What were you going to do with it?"

Flora was scared into a storm of injured confession. "You 'ain't any
call to talk to me so, Mrs. Whitman," she said. "I've worked hard,
and I 'ain't had a decent black silk dress for ten years."

"How can you have a dress made out of a back breadth, I'd like to
know?"

"It's just the same quality that Mrs. Hiram Adams's was, and--" Flora
hesitated.

"Flora Barnes, you don't mean to say that you're robbing the dead of
back breadths till you get enough to make you a whole dress?"

Flora whimpered. "Business has been awful poor lately," she said.
"It's been so healthy here we've hardly been able to earn the salt to
our porridge. Father won't join the trust, either, and lots of times
the undertaker from Alford has got our jobs."

"Business!" cried Sylvia, in horror.

"I can't help it if you do look at it that way," Flora replied, and
now she was almost defiant. "Our business is to get our living out of
folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just
as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to
have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and
buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr.
Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy.
We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole
black silk dress and they don't."

Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. "Need or not," said she, "the one
that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she
ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress."

With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the
parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few
minutes later she was pale but triumphant. "There," said she, "it's
back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora
Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've
got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel
the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next
week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it
right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left
here, I don't care how sickly it gets."

"If father would--only have joined the trust I never would have
th