And when Glen raged at the duplicity of the Altonia’s owner, again he urged patience. Let her trust him; he would soon be in a position to dictate. Why, that niece of the old man’s—the widow—Mrs. Bob Lee Tenafee, wasn’t that her name?—she’d been there with a bunch of club women, scolding about conditions in the mill, comparing it with others in the community, and he was soft as silk with her—but what did it amount to? Wait; wait!
Then Glen, with a twinge of treachery to Luke, went to the most responsible member of the Tolliver family, M’liss’, the maiden aunt.
M’liss’ Tolliver had been a tall woman, to begin with, but her shoulders sagged and her chest caved in and her stomach protruded until she had eliminated several inches from her height. She was as flat and thin as a paper doll, her skin was the color of tripe, and her dull eyes were utterly and absolutely devoid of all expression. The shapeless, dun-hued dress she wore was stained with snuff and tobacco juice, and her scanty hair was twisted into a frowsy knot at the back of her neck.
She received without enthusiasm Glen’s suggestion that Gloriana-Virginia be kept at home.
“No, me’um, I allus aim to keep young-uns to work,” she stated sagely. “Hit kindly does ’em good to keep movin’. I named hit to Super to put Beany on reg’ler—he’s the least one, that’s been dinner-totin’—but Super, he says they got a lot o’ pesky new-fangled laws ’bout not lettin’ young-uns make their salt!”
Glen let the general issue slide and held to the case in point. “But, M’liss’,—Glory isn’t well!”
The aunt shrugged a lean shoulder and treated herself generously to snuff before she answered. “Well’s she ever was; well’s she’ll ever be, I reckon. Her paw was pindlin’, too, and that young-un was borned sick.”
“M’liss’, listen to me! If you don’t take care of that child—she’ll die!”
“Well, won’t we all of us? Old pap, thar—” she nodded toward her sire, dozing in the sun, “he’s daid a’ready, only he don’t know ’nuff to lay still ’twell we bury him! No, me’um,” she spat with languid emphasis, “that Glory-chile, ef she was to lay off, she’d feel a heap sight wuss’n she do now, and what’s mo’, she’d be so plumb spi’lt thar’d be no livin’ with her!”
That evening, with a still greater sense of disloyalty to Luke, Glen sat down at Miss Ada’s beautiful old desk-bookcase and wrote an earnest letter to a certain society, begging them to send an investigator to the Altonia. Its conditions of safety and sanitation, she stated, were far below standard; it was breaking or evading the law in a dozen different directions; it was the worst mill in the community, in the state.