SECOND VOICE: Old Ronnie Beam. Heaven sake! Father Time has begotten. There’s no end to it. Seventy years old. FIRST VOICE: Why didn’t she take some clean meal and make a mush over her fire? Eat it hot with salt. SECOND VOICE: The habit of the locked storeroom. THIRD VOICE: Thank God she hasn’t got lice. What would she do to get rid of vermin? THEODOSIA: Coal-oil out of the lamp. Kills, they say. THIRD VOICE: A ten-pound girl. I tell you that-there, it’s weather. FIRST VOICE: The dog bread is not bad bread to eat; a little ashy, perhaps. Unsifted meal. Slobbered over by the two bitches, Tilly and Old Mam. SECOND VOICE, _softly_: She eats the dog bread. THIRD VOICE: A small musical talent. A limited achievement in music. THEODOSIA: Small talents should not be allowed. Small talents are treason. They shouldn’t be. In the night she lay half asleep, running with the dogs as they hunted in the wooded slopes back of the fields. Young Blix, Nomie, Speed, Congo, they were on the trail of a hare, of a fox. She ran with them down the woods and pounded the earth of the plowed field, keen to the scent. She howled with them when the smell of the fox was renewed where the fence crossed the track. Congo turned toward her beyond the water of the creek when they had lashed swiftly over, clattering the rocks and dashing the spray. She ran neck to neck with Congo, seeing into his red mouth, feeling his flying breath, his wide jaw. At the foot of the walnut tree they were on the varmint, all their teeth in his side, in his flank, leaping over him, tearing at his hide, emptying out his entrails, her teeth in his flesh. * * * * * One day after the evening meal below-stairs she turned to the hearth and broke a piece of one of the corn-pones that lay there withering under the heat since morning. She carried the bread to her room and ate a part of it as she sat before the cold hearth. The sticks were sacred to the fiddle and she did not burn one that night. Later there was speaking. FIRST VOICE: This is the whole story of the earth. He made love like a tomcat. Cat guts make fiddle strings. Cat guts hale souls out of men’s bodies. THIRD VOICE: The daughter of the Don Juan of the Kentucky villages. God knows! FIRST VOICE: The first to be born as far as is known at present was Lethe. River of forgetfulness. Her name shall be Lethe, saying, I forgot myself. A careless brown wench in a love mood and I forgot myself. THIRD VOICE: Then Americy. A whole continent to name an incontinent hour. THEODOSIA: A sad, kind-voiced creature. Given to religious practices.