When they smiled they showed blue-white, glassily
perfect false teeth that flashed incongruously in the ruin
of their wrinkled, sallow, weather-beaten faces. Mrs.
Brandeis would question them gently.
Children? Ten. Living? Four. Doctor? Never had one in
the house. Why? He didn't believe in them. No proper
kitchen utensils, none of the devices that lighten the
deadeningly monotonous drudgery of housework. Everything
went to make his work easier--new harrows, plows, tractors,
wind mills, reapers, barns, silos. The story would come
out, bit by bit, as the woman sat there, a worn, unlovely
figure, her hands--toil-blackened, seamed, calloused,
unlovelier than any woman's hands were ever meant to be--
lying in unaccustomed idleness in her lap.
Fanny learned, too, that the woman with the shawl, and with
her money tied in a corner of her handkerchief, was more
likely to buy the six-dollar doll, with the blue satin
dress, and the real hair and eye-lashes, while the Winnebago
East End society woman haggled over the forty-nine cent
kind, which she dressed herself.
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