Dorinda put on the dress and stood straight and still in the middle of her bedroom floor while the dressmaker let down the hem and took a pleat in the belt. "I've never seen anybody keep her figger so well as you've done," remarked Miss Seena. "It's stayin' out of doors an' movin' about so much, I reckon. My Ma used to say that when you get on in life, you have to choose between keepin' yo' face or yo' figger; but it looks as if you had managed to preserve both of 'em mighty well. You get sort of chapped and weatherbeaten in the winter time, an' the lines show mo' than they ought to, but that high colour keeps 'em from bein' too marked. You're forty now, ain't you, Dorinda?" "Forty-two. It's hard sometimes for me to believe it." "Well, you're the hard kind that don't wear away soon. Look at Geneva Ellgood, poor thing. She broke almost as quick as she grew." Dorinda sighed. "She needed love too much ever to find it," and she thought, "The surest way of winning love is to look as if you didn't need it." "Everybody knew that it was Jim Ellgood that made Jason marry her, and folks about here were mighty mad with him for throwing you over. It was that mo' than drink that ruined his practice because people didn't want a man to doctor them who hadn't behaved honourable. He began to go downhill right after that, and he and Geneva lived like cat and dog befo' she drowned herself. Jason is about as bad off now as she was, tho' men don't ever seem to get the craze that they're goin' to have a baby. But he's got a screw loose, or he wouldn't live way back yonder in the woods, with nobody but an old coloured woman to look after him." She was kneeling on the floor pinning up Dorinda's skirt, with the help of the red pincushion, shaped like a tomato, which she wore fastened to the bosom of her dress. "It was fortunate for you that Geneva got him," she concluded, "and that you waited and took Nathan instead. You must find a heap of comfort in feeling that you're the widow of a hero." The widow of a hero! Already Nathan's spirit, disencumbered of the gross impediment of the flesh, was an influence to be reckoned with. Alive, he had been negligible, but once safely dead, he had acquired a tremendous advantage. "I believe I'll drop if I have to stand a minute longer," Dorinda said in a fainting voice. Miss Seena was immediately solicitous. "Poor child, I reckon the shock must have unnerved you. You lie right down, and I'll have this dress ready befo' the minister gets here."