"Oh, it isn’t that," Ann sighed, and with her closed hand she pounded her heavy knee restlessly. "You see, Mary—oh, I don’t know—but, well, I can’t possibly be any way but the way the Lord made me, and to save my life I can’t feel grateful. They all just seem to me like a lot of spoilt children that laugh or cry over whatever comes up. Somehow a testimonial from a congregation like that, after a lifetime of beating me and covering me with slime, seems more like an insult than a compliment. They think they can besmirch the best part of my life, and then rub it off in a minute with good intentions and a few words. Why, it was the same sort of whim that made them all follow Jane Hemingway like sheep after a leader. I don’t hate ’em, you understand, but what they do or say simply don’t alter my feelings a speck. I have known all along that I had the right kind of—character, and to listen to their sniffling testimony on the subject would seem to me like—well, like insulting my own womanhood." "You are a powerful strange creature, Ann," Mrs. Waycroft said, reflectively, "but, I reckon, if you hadn’t been that way you wouldn’t be such a wonderful woman in so many ways. I was holding something back for the last, but I reckon you’ll sniff at that more than what I’ve already told you. Ann, when I got home, and had just set down to eat a snack before running over to you, who should come to my back gate and call me out except Jane herself. She stood leaning against the fence like the walk had nearly done her up, and she refused to come in and set down. She said she wanted me to do her a favor. She said she knew I was at meeting and heard what she said, but that she wanted me to come to you for her. As God is my final Judge, I never felt such pity for a poor rotten shred of humanity in all my life. She looked like she was trying to cry, but was too dry inside to do anything but wheeze; her very eyes seemed to be literally on fire; she looked like a crazy person talking rationally. She said she wanted me to tell you how sorry and broke up she was, that she’d pay back that hundred dollars if she had to deed away her dead body to some medical college. She said she could do anything on earth to make amends _except_ go to you face to face and apologize—she’d walk from door to door all over the country, she said, and tell her tale of shame, but she couldn’t say it to you. She said she had tried for weeks to do it, but she knew she’d never have the moral strength." "She talked that way?" Ann said, looking steadily out into the sunshine through the open doorway. "Yes; and I reckon you have as little patience with her message as you have with the balance," said the visitor.