Ma, drinking her cuppertee from the saucer, reveled in the genial warmth her daughter-in-law had caused to come up out of the cold, dark, nether regions into which she, herself, never descended, and felt a sense of virtuous satisfaction in her own personal benevolence, as she rehearsed all the gossip she had been able to cull from without or within, since her son Sammy's wife had been gone. Ma did not call it gossip, she called it news.
"'Twas Mrs. Peckett was in an' out, as usual, an' told me what was goin' on, or I'd never have known no more than if we'd been livin' in the Sarah desert, itself. 'Twas her told me what a bloody rascal is Buller that he'd be after comin' here, in the dead o' night wit' his fagots, to burn us alive in our beds, to say nothin' o' the gun he was for shootin' us wit', into the bargain. An' you to be standin' by, an' holdin' his hand, when 'twas cut off on account of the gangerine! Mrs. Peckett says every one in the place is callin' you a good Sam Maritan."
"'In me eye,' says Biddy Martin," Martha sang out sceptically.
"Mrs. Peckett was sayin' 'twas the wife's dooty stand by her own man, an' not another woman's at all. Mrs. Peckett was after sayin' God knows she's as quick to do a kindness, as the next one, but the evil tongues some folks do be havin' nowadays, would make you look out for your repu*ta*tion."
"Say, Ma," said Martha, "did you ever notice how some people'll try to keep their own place clean by shakin' their dirty rags on other people's heads? They don't care where the smut lands, so long's they've shook it off'n their own skirts. The trouble is, they sometimes get come up with. They don't watch which way the wind's blowin', so they get all their own dirt, an' then some, blown back on'm, which they'd better never have stirred it up, in the first place."
Without in the least understanding her daughter-in-law's drift, Ma felt it desirable to change the subject. Did Martha know that the Fred Trenholms had "leegially" adopted the three Fresh Air children they had had with them all this summer and last?
"An' they do be as proud, as proud! The way you'd think they'd a fortune left them, instead of a ready-made fam'ly to eat'm out o' house an' home, itself."
"The Trenholms are bricks!"
Ma coughed nervously, then tried again.
"That old bachelor brother o' Mrs. Coleses, the one's been so long sick-a-bed wit' the doctor, he's been took down wit' the meazles."