A definite coolness set in between my mother and Miss Brookie, and she no longer put in appearances at our house. But Miriam still went to her house for piano lessons, and Lizzie Maud was coming to us on Saturdays and for two hours every afternoon. When Lizzie Maud first began to come on a daily basis, her paper sack loomed large, so large that whenever Lizzie Maud was in the house, my mother used to say the sack was “a corn always between my toes.” One day, still feeling the stress of the factory incident, she could stand the tension no longer. Her terror at bringing the subject up was finally overwhelmed by her need to know, and at the end of one particular day she did it—she asked Lizzie Maud what was in her “bag.” This was a give-and-take with Lizzie Maud my mother would always say she was imparting to us exactly. According to my mother, Lizzie Maud stopped at the back door, held out her sack, and took the time to make a vocabulary correction. “You mean this here sack?”
