But still she stayed near the door to hear what people said of this new wife, and she heard some cry, “A very good and earnest-looking maid,” and some said, “They say she sews well, and if it is true she made those shoes she wears, she has ten good fingers, I swear!” And some among the women went up and fingered the red wedding robes and lifted the coat to see the inner ones, and all were well and neatly made, and the buttons hard and nicely turned of twisted cloth, and they ran and told the mother all, “A decent, able maid, goodwife, and with a proper look.” But some among the men spoke coarsely and one said, “Too thin and yellow for my taste, I swear!” and another called out, “Aye, but a few months will mend the thinness, brother--naught like a man to make a maid swell!” And in all this merry, ribald talk the maid moved demurely to her new home and so was wed. * * * * * Now must the mother leave the bed where she had slept these many years, and when the daughter-in-law came to make the bed for the mother that night, for so it was done in those parts, she made the pallet where the old dead woman once had slept behind the curtains, and later the elder son; and the blind girl had a pallet of her own beside it, and the younger lad slept in the kitchen if he slept at home. Yes, upon the true bed the elder son slept now with his new wife. It was not easy either for the mother to give up to this new pair that place which had been hers and her man’s, and it made her seem old to herself at night to lie on the old woman’s pallet. Through the day she could be usual, busy everywhere, commanding all, her tongue quick to correct and command, but at night she was old. Oftentimes she woke and it seemed to her it could not be she who lay there and the other pair upon the bed, and she thought to herself amazed, “Now I suppose that old soul who was mother when I came to this house felt as I do now, when I came a bride and pushed her from her bed and lay there with her son in my turn. And now another lies with my son.” It seemed so strange, so endless, this turning of some hidden wheel, this passing on of link caught onto link in some never ending chain that she was dazed with thinking of it even dimly, since she was not one to think into the meanings of what passed before her, but only taking all that came for what it was. But she was lessened in her own eyes from that day on. Even though she was in name the oldest and the first and mistress over all, she was not first in her own eyes. And she watched this son’s wife. She was dutiful and day after day she made her bow before her husband’s mother, until the mother grew weary and shouted at her, “Enough!” But the mother could not find any fault in her. Then was this very faultlessness a fault and the mother muttered, “Well, and doubtless she has some secret inner fault I do not see at once.”