"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you now," said Josiah, glancing furtively at his wife, who had proved to be a termagant with generous impulses which were brief but explosive.
"Of course your Ma could always come to live with us," suggested Elvira, obeying the briefest of these impulses. "She'd find plenty to do looking after the chickens, and the children would keep her from being lonesome."
Mrs. Oakley's eyes filled with tears. The old hound, having outlived his master, lay at her feet, and stooping over she stroked his head with a trembling hand. "But what would become of the farm?" she asked in a voice that quavered. "I want to die on the farm where I was born."
"We'll stay here alone, Ma and I," Dorinda declared, with the stern integrity she had won from transgression. "The farm belongs to Ma, and she and I can take care of it. We don't need a man," she added crisply. "If I couldn't do better than the men about here, I'd be a mighty poor farmer."
Elvira breathed more freely, and the wrinkles vanished from Josiah's forehead. As for Rufus, he had lost interest in the discussion as soon as it was decided that he might leave the farm in the autumn.
"I'm sure none of us would want to take Ma against her will," Elvira said, relieved and conciliatory because her generosity had been wasted. "The place belongs to her anyway, so the rest of us haven't anything to say about what she does with it." With a habitual jerk, which had annoyed Dorinda the first moment she saw her, the girl adjusted the belt of her skirt and rested her hands on her rapidly spreading hips.
"You needn't worry about Ma," Dorinda rejoined firmly. "I am going to take care of her." Her one wish, she felt, was to get Elvira and Josiah out of the house. Even Rufus was less depressing. Rufus at least had good looks; but Josiah and Elvira existed in her mind only as appalling examples of inherent futility. While she looked at Josiah, it seemed to her that failure oozed out of the very pores of his skin. Though he worked from morning till night, he was hampered by a fumbling slowness which reminded Dorinda of the efforts of a half-witted person. Yet her father, in spite of his ignorance, had possessed an industry that was tireless, while her mother was afflicted by a veritable mania of energy. Was it a matter of circumstances, after all, not of heredity? Had the more active strain succumbed at last to the climatic inertia? Well, if the fight had narrowed down to one between herself and her surroundings, she was determined to conquer. Beneath her sombre brows her eyes looked out like caged bluebirds. She was wearing a black calico dress which had once belonged to Miss Seena Snead, and the mourning brought out vividly the dusk of her hair and the bright red of her lips. "There's no use talking to me. I've made up my mind," she said.
An hour later, when Josiah and Elvira had gone home, Dorinda helped her mother to take off her mourning and straighten the chamber in which Joshua had lain.
"It's the smell of mourning I can't stand," said the girl, while she folded the crape veil and laid it away in the bandbox. "Do you think I'll have to wear it?"
"It wouldn't be respectful not to," Mrs. Oakley replied, and she asked after a minute: "What do you want with those overalls of Rufus's that you took upstairs?"