"Well, I won't let it interfere with my work. No man is going to do that."
Mary Joe bridled and giggled; for, being an engaging mulatto girl, she knew all that could be told of the interference of men. "Naw'm, dat dey ain't, nor breck yo' heart needer. Hit's a pity we ain't all ez strong-minded ez you is."
Dorinda laughed. "Break my heart? I should think not," she replied. And she meant what she said while she was saying it. One man had ruined her life; but no other man should interfere with it. She was encased in wounded pride as in defensive armour.
One of the other milkers, a big black woman named Saphira, smiled approvingly. "Hi! Dat's moughty sassy, Miss Dorindy," she exclaimed, "but hit ain't natur!"
After the milkers had gone home, Dorinda went into the dairy with Fluvanna and Mary Joe and worked until nearly midnight. Usually, she had finished by nine o'clock, at the latest, but to-night there were a dozen extra tasks for her willing hands to perform. As the hours went on she became so particular and so sharply critical that the two coloured women were driven to tears. "Ef'n you ax me, hit's a good thing she cyarn't git mah'd but oncet," muttered Mary Joe, as she was leaving.
At midnight, when there was nothing else that she could find to do and her limbs were aching from fatigue, Dorinda went back into the house and locked the hall door which Nathan had left unfastened. The lamp on the bracket by the staircase was flaring up, and she stopped to lower the wick, while Ranger rose from his bed on a mat by the door and sidled up to her.
"Is that you, Dorinda?" whispered a voice from beyond the bend in the staircase. "Do you work this late every night?" When she looked up, she saw Minnie May blinking down on her.
"No, not every night. We had put off the dairy work so that Fluvanna could go to the—" Her tongue stumbled over the word "wedding," so she said "church" instead.
Holding her red flannel wrapper together over her flat girlish breast, Minnie May stole noiselessly down the staircase. Her pale red hair hung in a tight pigtail down her back, and the wrinkles of premature middle age were visible in her young forehead. She was a girl who had, as Fluvanna tartly observed, "run to character instead of looks."
"I tried to wait up for you," she said, "but you were so long coming, and Pa wouldn't let me go out to the dairy. Mr. Garlick stopped by long enough to tell us about Geneva Greylock, and I thought you ought to know it. She threw herself into the old millpond this evening and was drowned."