Mrs. Brunson dressed flamboyantly, even when she was pregnant, wearing, in the evening, flowered chiffon dresses that trailed the floor behind and barely covered her knees in front and black satin afternoon dresses touched up with rhinestone gimcracks. She always wore high heels. From her rather large, powdered ears depended tarnished bangles. Her blond hair, lighter than Betty’s, dipped and rose in hard permanent waves that framed a puffy face with orange lips and an orange circle on either cheekbone, eyebrows like peaked black thread and a beak of a pink nose.

Maudie and I agreed that not only was she the handsomest, she was also the best dressed woman in Chichester.

“Mummy has style,” said Betty smugly.

“Yeah,” replied Maudie with a chuckle. “You mean the way she talks.” Betty nodded. Her mother did have a certain style but it was not the kind that prejudiced anyone in her favor. Her everyday language was a mixture of slang and profanity. For years she said “for crying out loud” with an occasional variation, “for crying in the beer,” and something that pleased her was “the cat’s pajamas.” But if she was annoyed with her husband, Maudie, a trades person or myself, she used a fastidious vocabulary and an elegantly sarcastic tone. “My good man, I scarcely mean to imply that all your meat is inferior,” she said once over the telephone to the butcher, “but the cut you have sent me is effroyable,” pronouncing the “effroy” to rhyme with “cloy.”

Betty, after a moment’s silence, inquired of the cook, “Maudie, when you got your boys, did they come right off the cake of ice or were they down on the shelves underneath?”

“Honey, I never got my boys that way. I got ’em like the cows git calves.”

The little girl was startled. The Beelers had used dogs for illustration. She had believed that they were insulting her parents and indirectly calling them liars by stating as fact something contradictory to what she had been taught. Now she was disturbed in her ivory tower to find Maudie, an old woman and a mother, addicted to the same heresy. She asked for a fuller explanation.

“Well,” Maudie began, “I ain’t saying it’s the same with everybody. Maybe we just tackle it this here way in Idaho.” She talked with an impersonal candor as Betty’s lips began to tremble and tears to falter from her eyes. When Maudie finished, “And I think it’s a mighty shame you never knew about it before. Why, dearie, my boy Horace went to his first bulling when he was four years old,” Betty burst into sobs and buried her face in the woman’s bosom. “It spoils everything!” she cried. “Everything!”

“Now looky here,” said Maudie, “you just quit that favoring yourself. Do you see Sonie Marburg bawling?”

But Betty sobbed on and on until finally she drooped with fatigue and Maudie carried her upstairs to bed.