The next morning Pearl failed to entice David into going to church and Sunday School with her, and Sally was left alone to prepare the big Sunday dinner—Mrs. Carson having gone to church in spite of her Saturday determination not to. David came smiling into the kitchen, immaculate in a white shirt and well-fitting gray flannel trousers, a book in his hand, a pipe in his mouth.
“Mind if I study out here on the kitchen-porch?” he asked Sally, his hazel eyes brimming with friendliness. “I like company and my garret room’s hot as an inferno.”
“I’d love to have you,” Sally told him shyly. “I’ll try not to make any noise with the cooking utensils.”
“Oh, I don’t mind noise,” he laughed. “Fact is, I wish you’d sing. I’ll bet you can sing like a bird. Your voice sings even when you’re talking. And any woman—” a delicate compliment that—“can work better when she’s singing.”
And so Sally sang. She sang Sunday School songs, because it was Sunday.
It was sweet to be alone in the kitchen, with David so near, his crisp, golden-brown head bent over his book, smoke spiraling lazily from his pipe. The old grandmother, looking very tiny and old-fashioned in rustling black taffeta, had gone to church, too, leading her middle-aged half-wit son by the hand. Benny had strained at his mother’s hand, trying to get loose so that he could kiss Sally and show her his bright red necktie, at which the fingers of his free hand plucked excitedly. As she remembered those vacant, grinning eyes, that slack, grinning mouth, Sally’s song changed to a heart-felt paean of thanksgiving:
“Count your blessings!
Name them one by one.
Count your many blessings—
See what God hath done!”
Oh, she was blessed! She had a good mind; sometimes she was pretty; she could dance and sing; children liked her—and David, David! Poor half-wit Benny, whose only blessings were a dim little old mother and a new red necktie! But wasn’t a mother—even an old, old mother, whose own eyes were vague, such a big blessing that she made up for nearly everything else that God could give?
But she resolutely banished the ache in her heart—an ache that contracted it sharply every time she thought of the mother she had never known—and began to sing again:
“I think when I read that sweet story of old,
When Jesus was here among men,
How He called little children as lambs to His fold—”