"Oh, I know that, you trifling hussy, but I do to you, Jane Hemingway. I’m going to tell you what you are. You are worse than a thief—than a negro thief that steals corn from a crib at night, or meat from a smoke-house. You are a low-lived, plotting liar. For years you have railed out against my character. I was a bad woman because I admitted my one fault of girlhood, but you married a man and went to bed with him that you didn’t love a speck. You did that to try to hide a real love for another man who was another woman’s legal husband. Are you listening?—I say, are you _listening_?" "Yes, I’m listening," faltered Jane Hemingway, her face hidden under her bonnet. "Well, you’d better. When I had my first great trouble, God is witness to the fact that I thought I loved the young scamp who brought it about. I _thought_ I loved him, anyway. That’s all the excuse I had for not listening to advice of older people. I wasn’t old enough to know right from wrong, and, like lots of other young girls, I was bull-headed. My mother never was strict with me, and nobody else was interested in me enough to learn me self-protection. I’ve since then been through college in that line, and such low, snaky agents of hell as you are were my professors. No wonder you have hounded me all these years. You loved Joe Boyd with all the soul you had away back there, and you happened to be the sort that couldn’t stand refusal. So when you met him that day on the road, and he told you he was on the way to ask me the twentieth time to be his wife, you followed him a mile and fell on his neck and threatened suicide, and begged and cried and screamed so that the wheat-cutting gang at Judmore’s wondered if somebody’s house was afire. But he told you a few things about what he thought of me, and they have rankled with you through your honeymoon with an unloved husband, through your period of childbirth, and now as you lean over your grave. Bad woman that you are, you married a man you had no respect for to hide your disappointment in another direction. You are decent in name only. Thank God, my own conscience is clear. I’ve been wronged all my life more than I ever wronged beast or man. I had trouble; but I did no wrong according to my dim lights. But you—you with one man’s baby on your breast went on hounding the wife of another who had won what you couldn’t get. You, I reckon, love Joe Boyd to this day, and will the rest of your life. I reckon you thought when he left me that he would marry you, but no man cares for a woman that cries after him. You even went over there to Gilmer a month or so ago to try to attract his attention with new finery bought on a credit, and you even made up to the daughter that was stolen from me, but I have it from good authority that neither one of them wanted to have anything to do with you."