eyes in the world; love and credulousness
seemed to look out of them with open faces.
"Why didn't you ever tell me that before? It
makes me feel more sure for him." After
a while she said: "You know, Jim, my father
was different from my mother. He did not
have to marry my mother, and all his brothers
quarreled with him because he did. I used to
hear the old people at home whisper about it.
They said he could have paid my mother
money, and not married her. But he was older
than she was, and he was too kind to treat her
like that. He lived in his mother's house, and
she was a poor girl come in to do the work.
After my father married her, my grandmother
never let my mother come into her house
again. When I went to my grandmother's
funeral was the only time I was ever in
my grandmother's house. Don't that seem
strange?"

While she talked, I lay back in the hot
sand and looked up at the blue sky between
the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear the
bees humming and singing, but they stayed
up in the sun above the flowers and did not
come down into the shadow of the leaves. An-
tonia seemed to me that day exactly like the

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v?