CHAPTER VIII
The funeral of Jane McPherson was a trying affair for her son. He thought
that his sister Kate, with the babe in her arms, had become coarsened--she
looked frumpish and, while they were in the house, had an air of having
quarrelled with her husband when they came out of their bedroom in the
morning. During the funeral service Sam sat in the parlour, astonished and
irritated by the endless number of women that crowded into the house. They
were everywhere, in the kitchen, the sleeping room back of the parlour;
and in the parlour, where the dead woman lay in her coffin, they were
massed. When the thin-lipped minister, holding a book in his hand, held
forth upon the virtues of the dead woman, they wept. Sam looked at the
floor and thought that thus they would have wept over the body of the dead
Windy, had his fingers but tightened a trifle. He wondered if the minister
would have talked in the same way--blatantly and without knowledge--of the
virtues of the dead. In a chair at the side of the coffin the bereaved
husband, in new black clothes, wept audibly. The baldheaded, officious
undertaker kept moving nervously about, intent upon the ritual of his
trade.
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