When little Annie had recovered and the danger of contagion was well over, Lizzie May came one Sunday to spend the day with her sister, bringing with her Granville and Viola in stiffly starched Sunday clothes and her new husband, Edd Havicus, who handled freight at the Clayton railway station. While Edd and Jerry and Columbia Gibbs and Joe Barnaby sat and whittled at sticks on the sunny side of the barn, the sisters visited together in the kitchen.
Lizzie May looked blooming and happy, and a layer of fat that was beginning to show just a trace of coarseness filled up the wrinkles that had lined her face after Dan's death.
She was continually rushing to the door to make sure that Granville and Viola were not playing in the mud, that they were not in the barn where they might go too near the horses nor anywhere in the vicinity of the horsepond. From the doorway she called out shrill admonitions and threats of future punishment. She found it hard to hide her pride in her own offspring and her disapproval of the dirty faces, muddy overalls and complete lack of manners of Judith's boys. The little girl was better, more clean, and quiet. But even she had not been taught to say "Thank yuh, ma'am," when you gave her a penny or a popcorn ball. If Lizzie May's children were ever negligent in this important matter she always admonished them reprovingly, "Well, naow, what d'yuh say?" and thus drew forth the belated avowal of gratitude. But Judith was shamelessly remiss in all such training. Lizzie May did not know whether it was from laziness or stupidity. She was grieved that a member of her own family should act so.
She was sadly shocked too when she looked about Judith's frowsy kitchen at the stove, innocent of blacking, the pots and pans crusted on the outside with a long accumulation of greasy
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 soot, the floor that needed scrubbing, the smoked-up teakettle and the littered shelves.
"My," she thought with a shudder that almost turned into a shrug, "haow kin she keep a-goin' in sech filth?"
But she would not for the world have said anything; for the longer sisters live apart the more polite they become to each other. And because she wanted to guard against saying anything or looking anything, she chose the safer and much more absorbing topic of her own recently settled home in Clayton. She was voluble and expansive over the new oilcloth in the kitchen, the ingrain carpet in the best room and the set of pink-sprigged dishes that Edd's mother had given her for a wedding present.
"I'm sholy glad I kep' my things an' didn't give 'em away at a auction, Judy. Sech things goes fer nothing when you sell an' costs a heap when you buy. We'd a had lots more expense settin' up housekeepin' if we hadn't a had 'em. Course some of 'em is old fashioned an' not jes what you would choose if you was a-buyin'; but we can't afford yet to have everything to match an' all in golden oak, like young Mrs. Jim Akers. Her things is swell, Judy. Sometimes when I look at the old chair Dan used to set in nights when he come in from the field, I jes can't hardly keep from bustin' out cryin'. An' yet it seems as if things works raound fer the best. Edd's awful steady an' don't never hunt an' hardly never drink. An' it's a heap nicer livin' in Clayton, Judy. No caows to milk nor skimmin' nor churnin' nor botherin' with hawgs an' hens. Sidewalks right to your door so's you don't hev to slush through mud every time you set foot outside. So much easier to keep the kitchen clean, specially with the oilcloth on the floor an' the men not allus trackin' in. Nice neighbors to speak to over the fence or drop in on of an afternoon with yer sewin', an' the store handy to run to, an allus sumpin a-goin' on, an' yer husband drawin' his money regalar every Satiddy night. I dunno haow I ever could go back to livin'," she almost said, "like this," but caught herself in time and ended, "the way I used to."
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Judith sat wondering why she could muster up so little interest and why she was not even offended by her sister's airs of superiority, as Lizzie May sang the praises of such urban elegancies as screen doors, garbage cans, and oil stoves.
"An' d'yuh know, Judy," she went on, "I hear there's talk of their startin' a picture show in Clayton. Wouldn't that be fine?"
"It wouldn't make no diff'rence to us," said Judith, smiling a little ruefully. "We're so fur off we'd never be able to git to it."
"Oh, but you must bring the young uns an' stop over night with me," said Lizzie May hospitably. "I got a grand new sanitary bed that his sister give us. All his folks seems to be well fixed. It's a pleasure, Judy, to be amongst people that's refined and has things nice."
Lizzie May seemed indeed to have assimilated the refinements of the town as the sponge sucks water. She was wearing high heeled pumps and nearsilk stockings, a skirt fashionably skimpy, a sweater of brilliant Kelly green and hair that had been put up over night in crimping pins. The mincing precision of her talk and ways had never been so apparent before, and she used the words "toilet" and "sanitary" with the connotations at once malodorous and antiseptic given to these once innocent words by urban Americans.
Judith felt a bit bewildered by all this newness: new clothes, new things, new words. "Toilet" and "sanitary," "swell" and "grand," were words that she had occasionally overheard in Clayton, but they fell strangely from Lizzie May's lips. She realized, with no particular feeling of regret, that the gulf between herself and her sister had widened.
She was glad when Lizzie May and her endlessly trained and endlessly guarded children were gone. Trying to pretend, to be interested in her sister's chatter had made her feel tired and headachy and she lay back in the rocking chair and closed her eyes. What a long time it seemed since she and Lizzie May were children together in the little log house that still stood scarcely more than a mile from where she sat. How
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 changed was everything, and yet how unchanged. The same houses and barns stood where she had always seen them, the same people, looking scarcely different, moved in and out. But everything was stark now, bald and bare that in her childhood had been softened by haze, mysterious and beautiful. Beautiful indeed and mysterious the world had seemed then. She called to memory many things out of her happy childhood, the scent of drying tobacco and autumn evenings when they legged it, all five of them, around the clothesline prop, sniffing the winy air like young hounds. There were delirious June mornings, too, when she scampered down the pasture to bring up the cows, and pure April twilights lilac-scented that quickened into being young tendrils of fancy as airy and opalescent as morning gossamer.
How glad and forward looking had been all that time, how forward looking all the thoughts and stirrings and bubblings of youth, always reaching out, reaching out—to what?
Snorting and neighing in the glorious make believe that they were a prancing team, the boys came around the corner of the house trundling a homemade wagon. Annie, driving the wagon, uttered shrill squeals and giggles of delight.
In the half gloom of the kitchen the mother smiled mournfully. It was their day now. But their day too would soon be over, and the question remained unanswered. To what?
She took up the milk bucket and went out to do up the evening chores. When she had fed the hogs and chickens and milked the cows and strained and put away the milk, she sliced some meat for supper and mixed the corncake batter, then sat down to mend a tear in one of Annie's dresses. As she sewed she lifted her eyes often to the window.
From the day that they had moved into the windy little house on the hill, the sunset had begun to reach out hands to her. She had grown into the habit of looking forward to the end of the day. Its approach meant that the waking hours of dismal tasks and constant frets and cares would soon be over, that the whines and wails and wrangles, the scraping of chairs, the tramping of muddy shoes, the whole meaningless
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 turmoil would come to an end, and for a little while there would be peace. Sometimes, too, there was an hour of quiet for her when the work was done, the children out at play and Jerry not yet come in for his supper. From the westward looking window she could see miles of rolling country that stretched to the long sweep of the horizon. Through the day the prospect did not vary greatly and she had not much time to spend in looking at it. But at sundown the west drew her eyes like a magnet. There, with the passing of the slow months, she saw glow into being and fade away the placid gold and azure sunsets of early summer, the hot, smoldering saffrons of August, the clear wine colors of September and the cold grays and yellows of winter. There, after the rain had poured heavily all day long, she sometimes saw the thick, one-toned pall of the sky lift itself away from a narrow strip of intensely glowing horizon against which distant roofs and treetops made a black landscape fringe sharply silhouetted against the shining river of light. And after a day of squalls and driving clouds, massed storm clouds hung their dark, rainy fringes around lakes of amber and pure apple green.
The cloud pictures fascinated her even more than the water landscapes on the wall; for in them there was infinite variety and change. She saw stately, turreted castles built upon the tops of crags that rose perpendicularly from shining water; and on the other side of the water perhaps a grove of great trees with weirdly twisted limbs. And even while she looked the outlines of the trees changed, the castle dwindled or loomed larger and there was a new picture. When she looked again it was all gone and there was left a peaceful valley with a river winding through it, a little steep-roofed house on the river bank and a church spire in the distance.
Faces, too, came out of the clouds, faces that held her eyes more than the landscapes: droll, exaggerated faces such as she had tried to draw when she was a little g............