‘I guess I can get most of the ironing done this morning, if you’ll see to the dinner,’ said Pauline, as she put the irons on the stove and went into another room for the heavy basket of folded clothes.
Dresses and hats and boots and gloves! The words kept recurring to her inner consciousness with a persistent regularity. She wondered what girls felt like who could buy what they did not need. She thought it must be like Heaven, but not Deacon Croaker’s kind; that looked less attractive than ever this morning.
As she passed Mrs Harding’s chair Polly put up her hands to be taken, but her mother caught her back.
‘No, no, Pawliney hasn’t got any more use for plain folks, Polly. She’s going to do herself proud shoppin’, so she can go to Boston and strut about like a frilled peacock. You’ll have to be satisfied with your mother, Polly; Pawliney doesn’t care anything about you now.’
Pauline laughed bitterly to herself.
‘A frilled peacock, with a ten-dollar outfit!’
She began the interminable pinafores. The sun swept up the horizon and laughed at her so broadly through the open window that her cheeks grew flushed and uncomfortable.
Lemuel burst into the room in riotous distress with a bruised knee, the result of his attempt to imitate the Prodigal Son, which had ended in an ignominious head-over-heels tumble into the midst of his swinish friends. This caused a delay, for he had to be hurried out to the back stoop and divested of garments as odorous, if not as ragged, as those of his prototype. Then he must be immersed in a hot bath, his knee bound up, reclothed in a fresh suit, and comforted with bread and molasses.
She toiled wearily on. The room grew almost unbearable as her step-mother made up the fire preparatory to cooking the noontide meal, and Polly wailed dismally from her cot. The youthful Prodigal appeared again in the doorway, his ready tears had made miniature deltas over his molasses-begrimed countenance, his lower lip hung down in an impotent despair.
‘What’s the matter now, Lemuel?’