get Miss Pease--can't you see that I am?"

The old woman's tittering laugh of denial made Felicia want to shake
her.

"That child--why you hain't she--she wouldn't be the matter of half
your age--you must be thirty-five or forty, hain't ye? She grew up and
run away like the rest of her women folks--" she giggled sardonically,
"Was a young limb, she was, I used to hear her whistling at them choir
boys next door--a young limb--all the girls in that family was man-
chasers--the mother run off with the rector's son--younger'n she was--
by a good two years I should say, she must ha' been thirty if she was
a minute--but pretty--prettier n' her mother--ever see the mother,
Miss Trenton--Miss Montrose that was?"

"Did you?" breathed Felicia. "Oh, did you see Grandy's Louisa?"

"Did I ever see her?" the Disagreeable Walnut leaned her sharp elbows
on the show case. "I see her when she was a bride--I'd just took
charge here then--she was a high-stepper! The Major hadn't a penny
when she married him but she had all the Montrose money and she got
him--some say as she told him if he'd marry her she'd live on what he
earned--but I guess he couldn't have earned the matter of her shoe
strings--not the way she dressed--she was stylish and tasty in her
dress--and then she eloped--with that lawyer fellow--some says she
didn't elope with him, but she went off for some French property her
mother had left her--but I dunno--she was an awful high-stepper. All I
know is that after she was dead and the Major brought Miss Octavia
home--"