"
From having been rather stigmatized as "that Vashti Mills", she came to be
relied on, and "Vashti" was consulted and quoted as an authority.
One cabin alone she never visited. The house of old Mrs. Stanley,
now almost completely buried under its unpruned wistaria vine,
she never entered. Her mother, as has been said, sometimes went
across the bottom, and now and then took with her a hare or a bird
or a string of fish -- on condition from Vashti that it should not be known
she had caught them; but Vashti never went, and Mrs. Mills found herself
sometimes put to it to explain to others her unneighborliness.
The best she could make of it to say that "Vashti, she always DO
do her own way."
How Mrs. Stanley's wood-pile was kept up nobody knew, if, indeed,
it could be called a wood-pile, when it was only a recurring supply
of dry-wood thrown as if accidentally just at the edge of the clearing.
Mrs. Stanley was not of an imaginative turn, even of enough to explain
how it came that so much dry-wood came to be there broken up
just the right length; and Mrs. Mills knew no more than that "that cow was
always a-goin' off and a-keepin' Vashti a-huntin' everywheres in the worl'."
All said, however, the women of the district had a hungry time,
and the war bore on them heavily as on everyone else, and as it went on
they suffered more and more.
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