at fair time.

The doctor raised his voice and said: "Honore, you cannot leave your
mother in this state; she may die at any moment." And the peasant, in
great distress replied: "But I must get in my wheat, for it has been
lying on the ground a long time, and the weather is just right for it;
what do you say about it, mother?" And the dying old woman, still
tormented by her Norman avariciousness, replied _yes_ with her eyes and
her forehead, and so urged her son to get in his wheat, and to leave her
to die alone, but the doctor got angry, and stamping his foot, he said:
"You are no better than a brute, do you hear, and I will not allow you
to do it, do you understand? And if you must get in your wheat to-day,
go and fetch Rapet's wife and make her look after your mother. I will
have it, do you understand me? And if you do not obey me, I will let you
die like a dog, when you are ill in your turn; do you hear me?"

The peasant, a tall, thin fellow with slow movements, who was tormented
by indecision, by his fear of the doctor and his fierce love of saving,
hesitated, calculated and stammered out: "How much does la Rapet charge
for attending sick people?" "How should I know?" the doctor cried. "That
depends upon how long she is wanted for. Settle it with her, by Jove!
But I want her to be here within an hour, do you hear?"

So the man made up his mind: "I will go for her," he replied; "don't get
angry, doctor." And the latter left, calling out as he went: "Take care,
you know, for I do not joke when I am angry!" And as soon as they were
alone, the peasant turned to his mother and said in a resigned voice: "I
will go and fetch la Rapet, as the man will have it. Don't go off while
I am away."

And he went out in his turn.

* * * * *

La Rapet, who was an old washerwoman, watched the dead and the dying of
the neighborhood, and then, as soon as she had sown her customers into
that linen cloth from which they would emerge no more, she went and took
up her iron to smooth the linen of the living. Wrinkled like a last
year's apple, spiteful, envious, avaricious with a phenomenal avarice,
bent double, as if she had been broken in half across the loins, by the
constant movement of the iron over the linen, one might have said that
she had a kind of monstrous and cynical affection for a death struggle.
She never spoke of anything but of the people she had seen die, of the
various kinds of deaths at