never around when he's wanted, and when he ain't, it seems like
a body couldn't git shet of him, nohow."

"Well, you ought to ring for him!" cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.

Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she
looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of
palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed in
the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she
was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the hope
that she was well.

"I'm just middlin'," Mrs. Dryfoos replied. "I ain't never so well,
nowadays. I tell fawther I don't believe it agrees with me very well
here, but he says I'll git used to it. He's away now, out at Moffitt,"
she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a
chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray
hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau's, March noticed. She
wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief
folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the
Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods
expressed itself to him from her presence.

"Laws, mother!" said Miss Mela; "what you got that old thing on for? If
I'd 'a' known you'd 'a' come down in that!"

"Coonrod said it was all right, Mely," said her mother.

Miss Mela explained to the Marches: "Mother was raised among the
Dunkards, and she thinks it's wicked to wear anything but a gray silk
even for dress-up."

"You hain't never heared o' the Dunkards, I reckon," the old woman said
to Mrs. March. "Some folks calls 'em the Beardy Men, because they don't
never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle
was one. He raised me."

"I guess pretty much everybody's a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain't a
Dunkard!"

Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to
his wife: "It's a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe--something like the
Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy."

"Aren't they something like the Mennists?" asked Mrs. Mandel.

"They're good people," said the old woman, "and the world 'd be a heap
better off if there was more like 'em."

Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook
hands with the visitors. "I am glad you found your way here," he said to
them.

Christine, who had been bending