The Ideas of Polly
CHAPTER I
DAN’S PLIGHT
“Well, Mis’ Lapham, I am sorry to hear it, I must say! It doos seem’s though you’d had your share of affliction!”
Mrs. Henry Dodge always emphasised a great many of her words, which habit gave to her remarks an impression of peculiar sincerity and warmth; a perfectly correct impression, too, it must be admitted. Her needle, moreover, being quite as energetic as her tongue, she was a valuable member of the sewing-circle, at which function she was now assisting with much spirit.
Mrs. Lapham accepted this tribute to her many trials with becoming modesty. She was a dull, colourless woman whose sole distinction lay in the visitations of 132 affliction, and it is not too much to affirm that she was proud of them. She was sewing, not too rapidly, on a very long seam, which occupation was typical of her course of life. She sighed heavily in response to her neighbour’s words of sympathy, and said:
“It did seem hard that it should have been Dan, just as he was beginning to be a help to his uncle, and all. But I s’pose we’d ought to have been prepared for it.”
“There’s been quite a pause in the death-roll,” the Widow Criswell observed. She was engaged in sewing a button on a boy’s jacket with a black thread.
“How long is it since Eliza went?” asked Miss Louisa Bailey, pursuing the widow’s train of thought.
“Seven years this month. She began to cough at Christmas, and by Washington’s Birthday she was in her grave.”