"O, you know, you'll soon be an old maid like your sister."
Jessie had not grown so wise as not to be nettled at this silly impertinent speech, but she was much more vexed to see that Florence was teaching Amy her own follies—Amy, who had always seemed like a pure little innocent wild rose-bud in its modest green leaves. So she answered, rather shortly—
"If you mean that I don't want to be right down ridiculous, I hope I am an old maid."
This seemed to be very funny, for Florence went off in fits of laughing, and kept shouldering Amy to make her see the joke, but Amy had by this time grown ashamed and frightened and only answered, "Don't."
So the three girls went in together, and no one took any special notice of Amy's hot face and uncomfortable gestures. It was the first time since she had been a very little child that she had shrunk from her aunts' eyes, or feared that they should ask her questions; and the sense that she had been undeserving of the trust they placed in her made her very ill at ease, though the silly girl did not do the only thing that would have set her right again, and made her safer for the future.
Jessie meanwhile had forgotten the little vexation. She had something to brighten her up in Miss Needwood's little note.
It was written on pink paper, edged with blue, as if nothing could be too good for Jessie; and it said no words could tell how glad she was, and what a comfort it was to have this real work to do. "It is really like a ray of hope in the darkness," said poor Bessie, in her little thin weak writing, with a very hard steel pen.
But that note warmed up Jessie's heart, although her finger was getting severely ploughed up with the stitching she had been doing to save her mother's eyes.
"There was not to be an inch of machine work," Mrs. Robson had said, and the Hollises were people who fulfilled all they undertook.
But Jessie's hour at home had helped and freshened her mother, who looked much less worn and worried than she had done the day before. Jessie felt she had done well to send away the handkerchiefs, and lessen the burthen Grace had taken upon the family.