The Butterfly Man looked up and one saw that cold sword-straight, diamond-hard something in his eyes:
"Parson," said he, grimly, "you're a million miles off the right track—and you know it. Leaving things to God—things like poor kids dying because they're gouged out of their right to live—is just about as rotten stupid and wrong as it can well be. God's all right; he does his part of the job. You do yours, and what happens? Why, my butterflies answer that! I'm punk on your catechism, and if this is all it can teach I hope I die punk on it; but as near as I can make out, original sin is leaving things like this"—and he looked at his small friend with her doll on her arm—"to God, instead of tackling the job yourself and straightening it out."
The child's mother, a gaunt creature without a trace of youth left in her, although she could not have been much more than thirty, shambled over to a chair on the other side of the bed. She wore a faded red calico wrapper—a scrap of it had made the doll's frock—and a blue-checked apron with holes in it. Her hair was drawn painfully back from her forehead, and there was a wispy fringe of it on the back of her scraggy neck. In her dull eyes glimmered nothing but the innate uneasiness of those who are always in need, and her mouth had drawn itself into the shape of a horseshoe. There is no luck in a horseshoe hung thus on a woman's face. One might fancy she felt no emotion, her whole demeanor was so apathetic; but of a sudden she leaned over and took up one of the thick shining curls; half smiling, she began to wrap it about her finger.
"I useter be right smart proud o' Louisa's hair," she remarked in a drawling, listless voice. "She come by it from them uppidy folks o' her pa's. I've saw her when she wasn't much more 'n hair an' eyes, times her pa was laid up with the misery in his chest, an' me with nothin' but piecework weeks on end.
"... She was a cu'rus kind o' child, Louisa was. She sort o' 'spicioned things wasn't right, but you think that child ever let a squeal out o' her? Not her! Lemme tell you-all somethin', jest to show what kind o' a heart that child had, suhs."
With a loving and mothering motion she moved the bright curl about and about her hard finger. She spoke half intimately, half garrulously; and from the curl she would lift her faded eyes to the Butterfly Man's.
"'T was a Sarrerday night, an' I was a-walkin' up an' down, account o' me bein' awful low in the mind.
"'Ma,' says Louisa, 'I'm reel hungry to-night. You reckon I could have a piece o' bread with butter on it? I wisht I could taste some bread with butter on it,' says she.
"'Darlin',' says I, turrible sad, 'Po' ma c'n give yo' the naked bread an' thanks to God I got even that to give,' I says. 'But they ain't a scrap o' butter in this house, an' no knowin' how to git any. Oh, darlin', ma's so sorry!'
"She looks up with that quick smile o' her'n. Yes, suh, Mr. Flint, she ups and smiles. 'You don't belong to be sorry any, ma,' says she, comfortin'. 'Don't you mind none at all. Why, ma, darlin', I just love naked bread without no butter on it!' says she. My God, Mr. Flint, I bust out a-cryin' in her face. Seemed like I natchelly couldn't stand no mo'!" And smiling vaguely with her poor old down-curved mouth, she went on fingering the curl.