After several introductory remarks, Tomasine laid her complaint against Laura and her other friends, considerately, but still clearly.
Laura answered: "When a girl does not allow herself to be hindered by the kind of life that John Kurt led, there is no use in any one else talking to her about it." Laura, for her part, had refused several men just because their conduct in that particular had been doubtful, or more than doubtful. But Hansen, she knew, was honourable in that respect as in others.
The tall Tomasine felt very small under little Laura's steady gaze and quiet words. She fell from the position of accuser to that of accused, and her fall was no trifling one. She had felt very superior up there for several years, and a few words spoken in the course of a minute or two had laid her low. She did not feel much respect for her own powers; nay, for a moment, it made her unhappy to think how short-sighted she had been. She actually felt anxious to discover if she were equally stupid in other things, but she soon so far regained her balance as to understand that to look only at one side of things may be partly the fault of circumstances.
She sat there without speaking, without listening; she had fallen into a reverie. Laura took the opportunity of leaving the room to prepare some chocolate, and to ask her husband to take her place while she was away. This, however, he had not time for at the moment, but still was so pleased that Tomasine had come again, that he felt he must just put his head in at the door to say so. He had on his leather apron, and held a shoemaker's stirrup in his left hand. Tomasine rose to grasp the other, but he waved her back, laughing. It was not fit to touch. "I only wanted to say many, many 'good days' to an old friend," he said after his fashion, as he drew back. But at that moment little Augusta came in again from the shop. She heard her father. He popped his head in again. "Just look at her. I always say that a dark person ought to marry a fair one. That is just what our two young ones are." And he shut the door.
Augusta was unusually tall and strong for her age. She was a full year older than Tomas. When Tomasine called her and spoke to her, the child surprised her.
There was a serenity in her eyes and brow, and a quietness in her way of talking, more like a grown person than a child. She was a contrast to Tomasine's own nervous little "Red-head," who never asked three questions about the same thing--a most pleasant contrast both outwardly and inwardly. Little Augusta went on questioning until the subject was clear to her own mind, and then would pass on to the next topic which came up.
Her hands were plump, but firm; his, thin, freckled, restless in their very shape. Her hair was dark and unusually plentiful, notwithstanding which it made the smoothest plaits; his stood up and stuck out in red bristles, which seemed to grow in layers; it was never tidy unless it were close cropped. He was bony and thin; she so plump, though thoroughly healthy. Tomasine recalled what she herself had been as a child. Why was not her child the same? She felt something almost like envy; to think that the little velvet jacket that Augusta wore was without a spot, though it was evidently far from new. Tomasine searched for one until it seemed to her that the whole little figure was solid soft velvet.
Her mother came in with the chocolate, and the ice being now broken, they found plenty of subjects of conversation, especially after Augusta had again been sent away.
Tomasine asked how the child had become so lovable, gentle, and sensible; and was told that she had never been headstrong. "Not even at first?" "Never, but clear-headed and staid from a tiny child."
The last thing that Tomasine wished was to say anything against her little Tomas, but the contrast was so great that somehow all that she had gone through was told, and what incessant care she had still to practice.