Pauline smiled to herself, as she cut generous slices of pumpkin pie to go with the doughnuts and bread and butter in the different dinner pails. That was just what tired her; being ‘on a level with the majority.’
The long morning wore itself away. Pauline toiled bravely over the endless array of pinafores which the youthful Hardings managed to make unpresentable in a week.
‘Monotony even in gingham!’ she murmured; for Polly’s were all of pink check, Lemuel’s blue, and Leander’s a dull brown.
‘Saves sortin’,’ had been the brief response, when she had suggested varying the colours in order to cultivate the æsthetic instinct in the wearers.
‘But, Mrs Harding,’ she remonstrated, ‘they say now that it is possible for even wall-paper to lower the moral tone of a child, and lead to crime——’
Her step-mother turned on her a look of withering scorn.
‘If your hifalutin’ people mean to say that if I don’t get papering to suit their notions, I will make my boys thieves an’ liars, then it’s well for us the walls is covered with sensible green paint that’ll wash. To-morrow is killing time, an’ next week we must try out the tallow. You can be as æsthetic as you’re a mind to with the head-cheese and candles.’
Pauline never attempted after that to elevate the moral tone of her step-brothers.
Her father came in at supper-time with a letter. He handed it over to her as she sat beside him.
‘It’s from your uncle Robert, my dear, in Boston. His folks think it’s time they got to know their cousin.’