“Why, Randy, what’s in your mind? Lately you’ve been dreamin’ most of the time, and askin’ queer questions between times. Are we what? Poor? Why no, I do’no’s we be. Your father ain’t a rich man, but he’s well-to-do. What put it in your head to ask me?”
“Nothing,” said Randy, “only I was wondering what the reason was that all the folks in church yesterday looked so different from Mrs. Gray’s boarders. Was it because they were poorer or was it some other reason?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Weston, as she took the towel from Randy’s listless hands, and commenced energetically to finish wiping the dishes, “I guess we’re as well fixed as any one around here; your father owes nobody nothin’, and our farm’s one of the biggest and best in the town. I’ve heard say that some city folks was rich, an’ I heard tell of other city folks as wasn’t so well off as their clothes seemed to make them out; and as to our lookin’ different, there ain’t any call to dress up any more than what we do now. I tell you what, Randy, to be clean and neat ought to satisfy any one.”
To this Randy could not agree, so she wisely said nothing. In her inmost heart she knew that, were she the possessor of an immense hat loaded with flowers, she would not have the courage to walk into church, the cynosure of all eyes. On the other hand, a sunbonnet never had looked so uncouth and unbecoming as now.
The dishes put away, the chickens fed, and a dozen other little chores attended to, Randy was free to do as she liked; so off to the “best” room she flew, eager to brighten it in any way which might suggest itself. The best room was a front room, and the front door, although seldom used, opened from it, showing a little garden in which grew boys’ love, larkspur, balsams, and, later in the season, marigolds.
But the front room and the front door were never used; and the little path from the door-stone to the flower beds was overgrown with weeds, years ago. The side door which led to the barn, the well, and the woodpile was the proper one to use. So Randy did not open the door; it never occurred to her to do so; but she drew up the green paper curtains, and let in the sunlight, and, although the room was scrupulously clean, she decided that the correct thing to do first was to dust.
Between the front windows stood a little table with an oil-cloth cover, dotted with red and green figures. Over the table, and quite too high for any one to take a peep, hung a small, square looking-glass with a broad, wooden frame.
Randy remembered having seen a huge asparagus plume over a mirror in the parson’s sitting room on one gala occasion when the sewing-circle had met there, and she had been permitted to be present with her mother. Asparagus, then, would be quite the thing with which to decorate the glass. The parson’s mirror had a gilt frame and a gorgeous landscape above the glass, and Randy felt sure that the wooden frame needed the decoration even more than the gilt one. The asparagus in place, Randy stopped in the middle of the floor, duster in hand, to view the effect. Her eyes wandered about the room, and this is what she saw.
On the opposite wall was a picture entitled “The Tree of Life,” on which every known virtue hung pendant from the branches on one side, while every evil of which man is guilty kept the balance on the other.
This picture always served to depress Randy. The tree was a sombre green, and Randy espied Envy printed in large type on that side where hung the sins, and she felt sure that a wee bit of envy had crept into her heart on Sunday, and as she looked at the pictured tree she said, under her breath: “Must have been vanity that made me almost hate my sunbonnet. The parson preached a while ago on the sin of vanity.”