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she blamed all Rose’s father’s troubles on medicines, doctors.
    “If you ever got up to any of that with a boy it would be the end of you,” she said. “I mean it.”
    Rose flushed with rage and said she would die first.
    “I hope so,” Flo said.
    H ere is the sort of story Flo told Rose:
    When her mother died, Flo was twelve, and her father gave her away. He gave her to a well-to-do farming family who were to work her for her board and send her to school. But most of the time they did not send her. There was too much work to be done. They were hard people.
    “If you were picking apples and there was one left on the tree you would have to go back and pick over every tree in the entire orchard. The same when you were out picking up stones in the field. Leave one and you had to do the whole field again.”
    The wife was the sister of a bishop. She was always careful of her skin, rubbing it with Hinds Honey and Almond. She took a high tone with everybody and was sarcastic and believed that she had married down.
    “But she was good-looking,” said Flo, “and she gave me one thing. It was a long pair of satin gloves, they were a light brown color. Fawn. They were lovely. I never meant to lose them but I did.”
    Flo had to take the men’s dinner to them in the far field. The husband opened it up and said, “Why is there no pie in this dinner?”
    “If you want any pie you can make it yourself,” said Flo, in the exact words and tone of her mistress when they were packing the dinner. It was not surprising that she could imitate that woman so well; she was always doing it, even practicing at the mirror. It was surprising she let it out then.
    The husband was amazed, but recognized the imitation. He marched Flo back to the house and demanded of his wife if that was what she had said. He was a big man, and very bad-tempered. No, it is not true, said the bishop’s sister, that girl is nothing but a troublemaker and a liar. She faced him down, and when she got Flo alone she hit her such a clout that Flo was knocked across the room into a cupboard. Her scalp was cut. It healed in time without stitches (the bishop’s sister didn’t get the doctor, she didn’t want talk), and Flo had the scar still.
    She never went back to school after that.
    Just before she was fourteen she ran away. She lied about her age and got a job in the glove factory, in Hanratty. But the bishop’s sister found out where she was, and every once in a while would come to see her. We forgive you, Flo. You ran away and left us but we still think of you as our Flo and our friend. You are welcome to come out and spend a day with us. Wouldn’t you like a day in the country? It’s not very healthy in the glove factory, for a young person. You need the air. Why don’t you come and see us? Why don’t you come today?
    And every time Flo accepted this invitation it would turn out that there was a big fruit preserving or chili sauce making in progress, or they were wallpapering or spring-cleaning, or the threshers were coming. All she ever got to see of the country was where she threw thedishwater over the fence. She never could understand why she went or why she stayed. It was a long way, to turn around and walk back to town. And they were such a helpless outfit on their own. The bishop’s sister put her preserving jars away dirty. When you brought them up from the cellar there would be bits of mold growing in them, clots of fuzzy rotten fruit on the bottom. How could you help but be sorry for people like that?
    When the bishop’s sister was in the hospital, dying, it happened that Flo was in there too. She was in for her gall bladder operation, which Rose could just remember. The bishop’s sister heard that Flo was there and wanted to see her. So Flo let herself be hoisted into a wheelchair and wheeled down the hall, and as soon as she laid eyes on the woman in the bed—the tall, smooth-skinned woman all bony and spotted now, drugged and