We got this interest together without your shirts, an' I guess we can the next.
It's been harder work than many folks in this town know anything about, but we've done it." Ann tossed her head with indescribable pride and bitterness.

There was scorn of fate itself in the toss of that little head, with its black lace cap and false front, and her speech also was an harangue, reproachful and defiant, against fate, not against her earthly creditor; that she would have disdained.
Squire Eben, however, fully appreciating that, and taking the pictures of pitiful feminine and childish toil which she brought before his fancy as a shame to his great stalwart manhood, spending its strength in hunting and fishing and card-playing, looked at the woman binding shoes with painful jerks of little knotted hands--for she ceased not her work one minute for her words--and took the bitter reproach and triumphant scorn in her tone and gesture for himself alone.
He felt ashamed of himself, in his great hunting-boots splashed with swamp mud, his buckskins marred with woodland thorn and thicket, but not a mark of honest toil about him.

Had he been in fine broadcloth he would not have felt so humiliated; for the useless labor of play cuts a sorrier figure in the face of genuine work for the great ends of life than idleness itself.

He would not have been half so disgraced by nothing at all in hand as by that bag of game; and as for the money in that old stocking under the feather-bed, it seemed to him like the fruits of his own dishonesty.
The impulse was strong upon him, then and there, to declare that he would take none of that hoard.
"Now look here, Mrs.Edwards," said he, fairly coloring like a girl as he spoke, and smiling uneasily, "I don't want that money." Ann looked at him with the look of one who is stung, and yet incredulous.

Elmira gave a little gasp of delight.