“I can't help it if you do look at it that way,” Flora replied, and now she was almost defiant. “Our business is to get our living out of folks' dying. There's no use mincing matters. It's our business, just as working in a shoe-shop is your husband's business. Folks have to have shoes and walk when they're alive, and be laid out nice and buried when they're dead. Our business has been poor. Either Dr. Wallace gives awful strong medicine or East Westland is too healthy. We haven't earned but precious little lately, and I need a whole black silk dress and they don't.”
Sylvia eyed her in withering scorn. “Need or not,” said she, “the one that owns this back breadth is going to have it. I rather think she ain't going to be laid away without a back breadth to her dress.”
With that Sylvia crossed the room and the hall, and entered the parlor. She closed the door behind her. When she came out a few minutes later she was pale but triumphant. “There,” said she, “it's back with her, and I've got just this much to say, and no more, Flora Barnes. When you get home you gather up all the back breadths you've got, and you do them up in a bundle, and you put them in that barrel the Ladies' Sewing Society is going to send to the missionaries next week, and don't you ever touch a back breadth again, or I'll tell it right and left, and you'll see how much business you'll have left here, I don't care how sickly it gets.”
“If father would—only have joined the trust I never would have thought of such a thing, anyway,” muttered Flora. She was vanquished.
“You do it, Flora Barnes.”
“Yes, I will. Don't speak so, Mrs. Whitman.”
“You had better.”
The undertaker and his son-in-law and Henry had remained quite silent. Now they moved toward the door, and Flora followed, red and perspiring. Sylvia heard her say something to her father about the trust on the way to the gate, between the tall borders of box, and heard Martin's surly growl in response.
“Laying it onto the trust,” Sylvia said to Henry—“such an awful thing as that!”
Henry assented. He looked aghast at the whole affair. He seemed to catch a glimpse of dreadful depths of feminity which daunted his masculine mind. “To think of women caring enough about dress to do such a thing as that!” he said to himself. He glanced at Sylvia, and she, as a woman, seemed entirely beyond his comprehension.