said we'd
got to live 'cording to nature more; and eating meat made folks fierce
like the carnivorous beasts, and things seasoned with salt was bad for
you, and jest plain farnishous foods without salt--like we was
_chickens_!--was best for us. I don't see how Mrs. Darter, who used to
cook real well and liked to have the sewing society to tea, could stand
sech sick stuff, but she did; and what's wuss, even after the fool
critter ran away and married a magnetic healer who, they do say, has
another wife, even to this day Abiel Darter believes in her and goes by
what she says. And she ain't et any fit food for so long that if she
ever does git coaxed to take a wholesome bite of beef or pie her
stummick is so weak of course she cayn't stand it. Strong folks can eat
strong vituals, and weak folks cayn't. Mrs. Glenn coaxed her in to a
boiled dinner one day, and poor Mrs. Darter nearly died of it. Now you
cayn't git her to budge from her grass and potato diet, as Conner calls
it. And as for poor Emmy, when she can git married Lord only knows!"

Miss Keith had not interrupted the story by as much as a hum of assent.
She looked up with a queer smile. "Has Mrs. Darter ever tried Christian
Science?"

"No, she ain't," snorted Mrs. Conner; "we've been spared _that_. The
Bigelow girls--they're two single ladies, real nice girls, too, who live
in that big brown house with a cupola and a hip-roof there, 'bout two
doors up--they tried to get her into that way of thinking; they're at
everybody. And they used to go over and set with her and give her
'silent treatment,' they called it, and try to think the dyspepsia out
of her; but one of 'em got a fish-bone in her throat and they had to
come to me to pull it out with a pair of tweezers. That sorter dampened
'em for a while and Mrs. Darter says, 'Why didn't you _think_ it out?'
And then Ann--she's the oldest--says they wasn't far enough advanced
yet, Mrs. Darter told 'em then they wasn't far enough advanced to doctor
_her_. And I guess they ain't been there sense."

"All the same," insisted Miss Keith, smiling, "I think Mrs. Darter needs
mental healing or Christian Science, I don't care which."

* * * * *

Emmy put her mother to bed. She gave her the soothing drops which the
vanished but still reverenced healer had left--drops which she was
almost certain owed their potency to some alias of opium. In the morning
Mrs. Darter came out of her drugged sleep