good standing with the Blacksmiths. You don't understand labor
conditions, Sarah. The unions have got to stick, if the men
aren't to starve to death."

"Oh, of course not," Sarah sniffed. "I don't understand anything.
I ain't got a mind. I'm a fool, an' you tell me so right before
the children." She turned savagely on her eldest, who startled
and shrank away. "Willie, your mother is a fool. Do you get that?
Your father says she's a fool--says it right before her face and
yourn. She's just a plain fool. Next he'll be sayin' she's crazy
an' puttin' her away in the asylum. An' how will you like that,
Willie? How will you like to see your mother in a straitjacket
an' a padded cell, shut out from the light of the sun an' beaten
like a nigger before the war, Willie, beaten an' clubbed like a
regular black nigger? That's the kind of a father you've got,
Willie. Think of it, Willie, in a padded cell, the mother that
bore you, with the lunatics screechin' an' screamin' all around,
an' the quick-lime eatin' into the dead bodies of them that's
beaten to death by the cruel wardens--"

She continued tirelessly, painting with pessimistic strokes the
growing black future her husband was meditating for her, while
the boy, fearful of some vague, incomprehensible catastrophe,
began to weep silently, with a pendulous, trembling underlip.
Saxon, for the moment, lost control of herself.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, can't we be together five minutes without
quarreling?" she blazed.

Sarah broke off from asylum conjurations and turned upon her