There’s no woman in the state of Florida has got more patience with the varmint in a man than me. It’s in his blood, just like a woman has got a little snake and a mite of cat. A man’s borned varminty and he dies varminty, and when the preacher asks do we believe our great-great-grand-daddies was monkies, I can’t scarcely keep from standing up and saying: Brother, a good ways back I figure things was a heap worse mixed up than monkies.

I ain’t throwing off on my Will. Will Dover’s a good man and a gentle. But even Will now, when he’s studying on slipping off down to the garage for a cock-fight, he’ll get that sly look in his eyes a ’possum’s got. It ain’t Will. It’s Jim Lee and Luty Higgenbotham. That pair—. I understand them. I’ve done been understanding them since we was young uns, and I’ve had patience with them.

My Will said yesterday, “Quincey, you been making the peace between them two all your lives. Nobody can’t see how come you now to be so hard on them.”

That’s it. That’s just it. They plumb wore out my patience. Men-folks had ought to know such things. A man’ll seem like a person to a woman, year in, year out. She’ll put up and she’ll put up. Then one day he’ll do something maybe no worse than what he’s been a-doing all his life. She’ll look at him. And without no warning he’ll look like a varmint. That day come to me with Jim and Luty. It come on account of that blasted mule they owned together. And I say they got no good right to crawl me for what I wrote and the Bugle printed it.

Jim Lee and Luty Higgenbotham—. Why, them two had never ought to have begun to own no mule together. Let alone no such mule as that un, that’d raise aggravation amongst the angels. Jim and Luty always has been like pure game cocks for mixing it. One word outen the way, and they’d raise their crests like a pair of White Hackle roosters. They begun it forty year ago when they was two little old shirt-tail boys going to the Oak Bluff school together, and me a little old gal young un with a red knitted petticoat was always hanging down in loops, like. They was forever tormenting me about that red petticoat. They said I was like a red-bird with its tail feathers dragging. And that was near about the only thing they ever did agree on.