Mrs. Pullet brushed each door-post with great nicety about the latitude of her shoulders (at that period a woman was truly ridiculous to an instructed eye if she did not measure a yard and a half across the shoulders), and having done that, sent the muscles of her face in quest of fresh tears as she advanced into the parlor where Mrs. Glegg was seated. 'Well, sister, you're late; what's the matter?' said Mrs. Glegg, rather sharply, as they shook hands. Mrs. Pullet sat down, lifting up her mantle carefully behind before she answered. 'She's gone,' unconsciously using an impressive figure of rhetoric. 'It isn't the glass this time, then,' thought Mrs. Tulliver. 'Died the day before yesterday,' continued Mrs. Pullet; 'an' her legs was as thick as my body,' she added with deep sadness, after a pause. 'They'd tapped her no end o' times, and the water--they say you might ha' swum in it, if you'd liked.' 'Well, Sophy, it's a mercy she's gone, then, whoiver she may be,' said Mrs. Glegg, with the promptitude and emphasis of a mind naturally clear and decided; 'but I can't think who you're talking of, for my part.' 'But _I_ know,' said Mrs. Pullet, sighing and shaking her head; 'and there isn't another such a dropsy in the parish. _I_ know as it's old Mrs. Sutton o' the Twentylands.' 'Well, she's no kin o' yours, nor much acquaintance, as I've ever heard of,' said Mrs. Glegg, who always cried just as much as was proper when anything happened to her own "kin," but not on other occasions. 'She's so much acquaintance as I've seen her legs when they were like bladders.... And an old lady as had doubled her money over and over again, and kept it all in her own management to the last, and had her pocket with her keys in under her pillow constant. There isn't many old _parish's_ like her, I doubt.' 'And they say she'd took as much physic as 'ud fill a wagon,' observed Mr. Pullet. 'Ah!' sighed Mrs. Pullet, 'she'd another complaint ever so many years before she had the dropsy, and the doctors couldn't make out what it was. And she said to me, when I went to see her last Christmas, she said, 'Mrs. Pullet, if iver you have the dropsy, you'll think o' me.' 'She _did_ say so,' added Mrs. Pullet, beginning to cry bitterly again; 'those were her very words. And she's to be buried o' Saturday, and Pullet's bid to the funeral.'