“Smart?” Aunt Sadie cried, and went off into billows of large mirth. “Well, you may call ’em smart, but I dunno’s they look so stylish to me. There’s old Betty Willets from off Rocky Ridge. She drives her old wagon an’ broken-down horse into town, to collect the swill from folks’ backyards to take up to her hog. She’s one of our smart smokers. An’ they all smoke up Spitzer’s Holler--an’ chew too--they’re ’bout the lowest-down lot of folks we have ’round here. Oh, no, you ain’t the first I’ve seen smoke, not by a long sight. But it does look like a pity for a right young woman like you to be smoking and chewin’--it’ll just ruin your teeth.” “Chew?” cried Elizabeth wildly. “You don’t think I chew tobacco, do you?” “Oh, don’t tell me!” Aunt Sadie returned. “I never saw a woman yet who smoked, that she didn’t chew on the sly an’ dip snuff, too. Oh, I’d be the last person in the world to say there was any real harm in it,” she went on tolerantly, “with so many of our old folks still doin’ it; it’s only that I always did think chewin’ an’ spittin’--” “I don’t chew!” Elizabeth cried furiously. “Of course I don’t! Who ever heard of such a thing? Well, I’m going,” she announced, flouncing to the door. “An’ I’ll say this, Miss Rose,” she added, “I don’t think _you’re_ any too polite either to strangers. In all the time I’ve been here, you’ve hardly said two words, and you haven’t so much as asked me to take a chair.” Angry tears leaped in her eyes, and she flung herself away out of the shop and up her own stairs. “Well, the poor thing,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I made her mad all right! I reckon it was a sin, but I just couldn’t stand her airing ’round here with that cigarette, an’ showings off to us moss-backs. What’d you let her smoke in here for, Julie? You know your mother wouldn’t have liked it.” “I didn’t know how to stop her,” Julie confessed helplessly. “Well, I stopped her all right!” Aunt Sadie returned, shaken again by large laughter. “But ain’t the world funny, Julie? Here we’ve all come to look down on smokin’, and feel sort of ashamed of the old women that still do it, when along comes all the young smart Alecks, an’ says it’s the thing to do, an’ if you don’t do it, it just shows you’re right from the backwoods. Now ain’t that funny? If you just live long enough in the world, you’ll see everything turned upside down! But I feel kind of sorry for poor Mis’ Bixby,” she added tolerantly. “_Sorry_ for her?” Julie’s eyes opened in astonishment. “Yes,” the other nodded her large gray head. “Don’t you think it’s kind of pitiful to see a grown person putting so much confidence in fine clothes, and thinking she’s so grand showing off with a cigarette? When you’ve been up against real life like I have, that kind of cheap person seems right pitiful.” “She just stifles me,” Julie said. “She’s so--so big an’ satisfied with herself.”