Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner

Mrs. Burney's black was neat and completely airproof: she did not believe in air save as a necessary adjunct to breathing. Mr. Burney, a morose, silent man, whose occupation was that of languidly sawing boards and then mildly nailing them together again, took all his ideas from his wife, so he believed this, too.

She toiled, neat as a pin, along the street, both fretted with and grateful to the heat because of her rheumatism, making a call. When she thought of her destination, of her changed status in the town, above her dull and quenchless sorrow she knew a faint pride: the stroke of Fate which robbed her likewise made of her an aristocrat. The Mrs. Worthingtons, the Mrs. Saunderses, all spoke to her now as one of them, as if she, too, rode in a car and bought a half dozen new dresses a year. Her boy had done this for her, his absence accomplishing that which his presence had never done, could never do.