She had been pretty once, and she was not an old woman now, but her beauty was all gone.

Her slender shoulders rounded themselves over the little creature swathed in soiled flannel on her lap.

Just then it was quiet; but it began wailing again, distorting all its miserable little face into a wide mouth of feeble clamor as Jerome drew near.
Mrs.Upham looked down at it hopelessly.

She did not try to hush it.
"It's cried this way all night," she said, in a monotonous tone.
"It's goin' to die." "Now, Laury, you know it ain't any sicker than it was before," John said, with a kind of timid conciliation; but she turned upon him with a fierce gleam lighting her dull eyes to life.
"You needn't talk to me," said she--"you needn't talk to me, John Upham, when you won't have the doctor when it's your own flesh an' blood that's dyin'.

I don't care what he's done.