Mrs. Libby was a large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of
such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge--soft
cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors.
She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the
little silver-striped adder that I found one day, mangled by some
passing cart, in the yellow dust of the road. Her lips were stretched
for ever in that same flat, immutable smile. When she moved her head,
you caught the gleam of a string of gold beads, half-hidden in a crease
of her stout throat. She had still a coarsely handsome figure, she was
called a fine looking woman; and every afternoon she sat and sewed by
the window of her parlor, dressed in a tight, black gown, with
immaculate cuffs about her thick wrists. The neighbors--thin, overworked
women, with numerous children--were too tired and busy to be envious.
They thought her very genteel. Her husband, before his last illness, had
kept a large grocery store in a village on the South side of the Island.
It gave her a presumptive right to the difference in her ways, to the
stuff gown of an afternoon, to the use of butter instead of lard in her
cookery, to the extra thickness and brightness of her parlor carpet.
For days I steeped my soul in the peace and quiet. In the long mornings
I went down the grassy path to the beach, and lay on the yellow sands,
as lost to the world as if I were in some vast solitude.
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