"No, 'm."
"There!" said Lucindy, watching the precise little back across the hall, "Now le's talk a mite about vanity. You reach me that green box behind your chair. Here's the best flowers Miss West had for what I wanted. Here's my bunnit, too. You see what you think."
She set the untrimmed bonnet on her curls, and laid first a bunch of bright chrysanthemums against it, and then some strange lavender roses. The roses turned her complexion to an ivory whiteness, and her anxious, intent expression combined strangely with that undesirable effect.
"My soul, Lucindy!" cried Mrs. Wilson, startled into a more robust frankness than usual, "you do look like the Old Nick!"
A shade came over Miss Lucindy's honest face. It seemed, for a moment, as if she were going to cry.
"Don't you like 'em, Jane?" she asked, appealingly. "Won't neither of 'em do?"
Mrs. Wilson was not incapable of compunction, but she felt also the demands of the family honor.
"Well, Lucindy," she began, soothingly, "now 'tain't any use, is it, for us to say we ain't gettin' on in years? We be! You 're my age, an'—Why, look at Claribel in there! What should you say, if you see me settin' out to meetin' with red flowers on my bunnit? I should be nothin' but a laughin'-stock!"
Lucindy laid the flowers back in their box, with as much tenderness as if they held the living fragrance of a dream.
"Well!" she said, wistfully. Then she tried to smile.