... and without even removing her hat and coat, not even pausing
to sit down, she announced firmly to the assembled relatives that she herself
intended to take sole charge of the infant boy from then on.
For the past thirty years she had lived a strange isolated life all by herself in a tiny cottage high upon the slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, several miles from the nearest village. She had five acres of pasture, a plot for growing vegetables, a flower garden, three cows, a dozen hens, and a fine cockerel.