Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/149

 big white water pitcher were objects of loathing to her. She hated the sight of the calendars and little pictures that she had tacked on the walls. There was one picture that particularly irritated her, though she could not have told why. It was a still life representing dead grouse and partridges lying on a table. One day she took the picture down from the wall and stuffed it into the stove, getting at least a momentary feeling of satisfaction from hearing it crackle up the stovepipe.

There was one dish that seemed to her especially odious, a berry bowl that Lizzie May had given her as a wedding present. It was made of imitation Tiffany glass, and she had thought it lovely until this strange malady had seized upon her. Now she could not bear to look at the crude bronze and green and purple lights that it cast at her. It seemed an evil and poisonous thing. She poked it into the bottom of one of the bureau drawers and covered it up with sheets and pillow slips.

Jerry, too, came in for his share of the general odium. She developed a great dislike for certain little inoffensive habits that he had, such as rubbing his hands together over the fire, whistling loudly as he went about his chores and teasing the pup for the fun of hearing him growl and snap. When he kissed her, which she now rarely allowed him to do, she was conscious with a shiver of repugnance that he needed a shave and that he had been chewing tobacco.

One afternoon, when existence about the house seemed intolerable, she put on her sunbonnet and started out on the cowpath that led along the top of the ridge and down into the hollow where Hat and Luke lived.

Hat was plucking geese in the back dooryard. This side of the house was littered with an accumulation of broken boards, rusty pieces of scrap iron, old rags, papers, empty bottles, discarded cooking utensils and rusted-out tin cans. Hat was not the pink-and-white vision that she had been on the day when she had first visited Judith. She wore a ragged calico wrapper, faded by much sun and many washings, into a dismal drab. About her waist was pinned a greasy gunny