Think I didn’t know? Think I didn’t know how they passed by and called out, stopped to visit, all the women I’d known all my life, so they could smile to my face and snicker behind my back? Because after all I had been tossed out by the district’s leading family, the arbiters of manners and good taste, and serve me right, what would I do now I’d been cast down low? Sam’s little child-bride. As if they knew more than I did what that meant. Good old Sam! The women all hugged him and the men slapped him on the back as if he had gotten into the henhouse by stealth and snatched something away from the hens. Sly mongoose! Was that saying something about their attitude to the hens? Or did they know that the treasure was not a pretty little chick but an unhatched egg? Not one of them hugged me. But then, I wasn’t huggable, I was already folded into myself, and the prickly stuff that Ma D had managed to smooth away was bursting into growth again as if the egg was turning into a spiny sea urchin.
