The tears were on my cheeks, and my tea was stone cold, when Mrs. Bulkley paused to refill her exhausted lungs and swallow another bracer. Mary had, meantime, been steadily eating, grinding with the regularity of a machine, swallowing with the satisfaction of a _gourmet_. She had devoured her own share of the meal and was now making predatory attacks upon certain portions belonging by rights to me, and I, believing that the “Busy B” was only getting her second wind and would start again directly, told her in a whisper to go ahead and eat it all, an arrangement satisfactory to us both, since I preferred Mrs. Worden’s story to eating, and Mary preferred eating to any story of any woman alive or dead. Mrs. Bulkley was about to resume her narrative, when she paused to shout an order to the cook in the kitchen “not to use none of that _good_ butter in no cooking out there,” and I actually felt my flesh creep. It was the double shock that told upon the nerves. There was first that awful attack upon poor Lindley Murray, pounding him with negatives, then there were the rending possibilities connected with the butter that _would_ be used in the cooking out there. And I was glad that I was not Mary. Mary, hearing that order, had simply let her eyebrows slide up her forehead a bit and then slide down again, while she went on eating. Mrs. Bulkley suddenly remarked: “I see you’re crying; well, well, I used to cry about Myra Worden myself, sometimes. But when you get old your tears come harder, like everything else, pretty nigh. I don’t know’s I exactly sense why you should cry for her losin’ that great hulk of a fellow, though.” “Oh!” I cried, “her pride, think of that! To have been abandoned for some great woman, some rare beauty, would have been bad enough, but to have been cast aside for a gross and common thing that cursed and tore him like a beast, and all in the very face of the public! How could she bear it all, poor thing?”