Judith sensed at once the familiar aura that had become her abhorrence. There was an air of condescension, too, as from one who confers a favor. She had never liked Aunt Maggie.
"I'm a-feelin' all right," she answered coldly, and went on washing the dishes.
"Well, that's good, Judy. It's a great blessin' to be well."
Having disposed of her overshoes, she laid aside her black sateen sunbonnet and started to divest herself of her outer garment. This task proved too much for her.
"I reckon you'll have to give me a little he'p here, Judy," she breathed, already winded by her efforts. Judith went over and helped her to peel the wrap from her fat arms and shoulders. It was an ancient garment called some decades earlier, when it had been new and fashionable, a dolman. It was of broadcloth, now faded into a greenish tinge, and it was trimmed with fringe, which was somewhat greener than the cloth. She laid the dolman over the back of a chair with the care and reverence due to best apparel and sat down again, smoothing her white apron over her lap.
Aunt Maggie was a woman of great girth. She had a large, flabby face of the color of cold boiled veal, so many large chins that they quite obscured what might have been her neck, a colorless, thin-lipped mouth and small, piercing, light gray eyes which gave Judith the uncomfortable feeling that they were bent upon prying into the innermost recesses of her private affairs. She had a way of asking a question in a sudden, direct and commanding way and accompanying it with a swift, searching look from her keen gray eyes, which seemed to say that she was entitled to the whole truth and she meant to have it.
Undaunted by Judith's assertion of present perfect health, an assertion which seemed to Aunt Maggie to be somehow rather indelicate, she proceeded, as one vested with authority, to inquire into the earlier history of Judith's pregnancy and to wrest from her admissions upon the basis of which she launched forth into the subject that she had come to discuss. She had a hoarse male voice and the air of one accustomed to dictate to others. Glancing about from time to time, as though constantly mindful of the fact that walls might have ears, she related to Judith all the details that she could remember—and her memory was excellent—concerning her own many pregnancies and the pregnancies of various of her neighbors and kinsfolk.
After a while Aunt Maggie's stream of talk began to flag. There was no stimulation to be gotten from Judith, who asked no questions and made few comments. And even a woman of fifty-three who cannot read or write, but has had seven children and three miscarriages, cannot talk forever on the pathology of pregnancy without at least some little assistance from her listener.
The talk began to be punctuated by heavy silences.