"Dear child," says Mis' Sykes, "wouldn't it be a comfort to you, now that you're among friends, to talk about your folks? What was it they died of? Was they sick long?"
Letty looked over to her, sweet and serene.
"Beautiful things happened while they were sick," she said. "A little child across the street used to come every morning with a flower or a fresh egg. Then there was an old man who picked every rose in his garden and sent them in. And a club there hired a singer who was at the theater to come and serenade them, just a few days before. Oh, so many beautiful things happened!"
Mis' Sykes and Mis' Merriman sat still. This isn't the way we talk about sickness in the village. We always tell symptoms and treatments and pain and last words and funeral preparations, right up to the time the hearse backs up to the door.
"She acts the queerest, to me, for a mourner," says Mis' Sykes, when she went for her shawl.
Next morning we went down, Letty and me, to pick out the monument. Letty, she priced them, and then she figured some on a card. Then she walked over and priced some more things, and then she came out. I s'posed she was going to think about it.
"Didn't she cry when she picked out the monument?" says Mis' Sykes to me over the telephone that noon.
"I didn't see her," says I, truthful.
That night, after he got the last cow milked, I see George Fred, in his best clothes, coming in our front gate. He was coming, I see, to do what I said—help be good to Letty and cheer her up.