Fury took possession of her, like a moccasin swallowing a small gray rabbit. She hated everybody; Lige, crying out now and then behind the closed door in his drunken sickness; the town, with its intruding eyes and waggling tongues; the Widow Sellers; the parson; above everything else, the bean money. She stamped her foot.

“What’s a-goin’ on ain’t nobody’s business. I’ll settle with God when I git straightened out. I got no money for you now, nor maybe never. I’ve give what I could for missions, an’ I always will. But I need what we got now for the chappies an’ things you know nothin’ about. You go on now.”

She drove him from the house, locked the door and plodded furiously down the road to hail the ice-truck. In Pondland, she opened the account at the bank with a boldness foreign to her.

“I want fifty dollars o’ that back in cash money,” she said belligerently.

Her lips moved.

“Jest what Lige takened,” she said to herself.

On the streets of the city again, she found herself dazed. The bills were clutched in her fist. She knew only that she intended to spend them, recklessly, foolishly, wickedly. In the shop windows were dresses for summer; hats and shoes. She smoothed back her soft hair. She had come off without any hat at all. A red chiffon dress caught her eye. She walked in a dream into the shop and pointed out the frock. The saleswomen lifted their eyebrows at one another. They helped her take off her calico dress and put on the red chiffon over her white muslin slip.

“Of course now, with a silk slip, and nice shoes——”

In the long mirror were reflected a white frightened face with gray eyes, pale tight lips, and bare arms and throat above a flaming pile of soft fabric. She nodded. The saleswoman folded the dress in tissue paper and laid it carefully in a box.

“Forty-five dollars.”

She held out the bills.

Bean money. Lige’s fine crop of beans. She saw the six acres, green with gold pendants hung over them. She remembered the pickers moving in with the tall hampers on their shoulders, swaying and singing. The field was empty now, waiting for fall beans. The new bills crackled in her fingers. This was all they had to show for the crop. The rest was in Lige’s tormented belly; and in the strange, impersonal bank, dropped from sight like a stone in a pond.

The bean money had been queer stuff. Checks in writing that everybody scrambled to get at. . . . Lige acting scandalously. . . . Her impudence to the preacher. . . . Now a red dress tempting her to go about like a lewd woman. She shivered.

“I cain’t do it.”

She put the money behind her back.

“I cain’t do it.”

Outside the shop she stuffed the bills inside her blouse. She rode home on the loaded ice-truck.