"My it is nice," exclaimed Judith, reverently feeling the smoothness of the silk and satin pieces with the tips of her fingers. "I'm a-goin' to make me one when I git enough silk pieces saved—if I ever do."
Encouraged by this admiration, Lizzie May brought out the other pillow tops together with the coarse imitation lace curtains, and spread them gleefully before her sister. She was a child again in the delighted ownership of these "pretty things." Judith, too, was filled with childish envy and emulation. Together they exclaimed and rhapsodied over the colors, the embroidered flowers and the fine herringbone stitching done by Lizzie May's painstaking little hand.
"They're awful nice to have," said Judith, with an intake of the breath. "But somehow I've never had much patience to make sech things. I've allus liked better to draw pitchers of hosses an' dawgs an' mules an' folks that looks like 'em. I do love to draw sech things yet. But of course they hain't pretty. Mebbe now I'm married I'll take more interest in sewin' an' makin' nice things for the house."
"Of course you will, Judy," encouraged Lizzie May, with more than a touch of patronage.
CHAPTER IX
Contrary to Lizzie May's predictions and somewhat to her disappointment, Judith failed to suffer from the marital troubles that increasingly vexed her own life. Jerry proved to be, at least according to Lizzie May's standards, a much better husband than Dan. He did not care for the sport of fox hunting, so there were no hounds to bay around the house at night and greedily lick of the corn meal that could ill be spared. He never went anywhere in the evenings, and he had not been drunk a dozen times in his life. Lizzie May had to admit to herself that Judy, the wild and harum-scarum, who was capable of almost any foolishness, had made a much more sensible choice than she. But of course it was nothing but luck, she told herself. She felt in a vague, half acknowledged way that she had a quite justifiable complaint to make against the powers that be because chance had favored the irresponsible instead of meting out just reward to the careful and prudent. This did not mean that she would have been willing to exchange Dan for Jerry. She would have scorned such an opportunity. Dan was Dan. He was the man who had courted her. He was hers. But she would have liked to borrow some of Jerry's qualities and insert them craftily into Dan's character, making him over into a husband more contributory to her comfort and convenience.
All that summer, in spite of the toil of the field, Judith was joyous and radiant. And she worked hard. She could not take the matter of earning a living as seriously as did Jerry; but she caught some of the infection of his ambition to raise big crops and lay by money for a home of their own. So she worked in the corn and tobacco as determinedly as he, stopping only to cook their simple meals and wash up the few dishes, with an occasional day off for washing clothes. Besides helping Jerry in the field, she looked after her chickens and turkeys and made a kitchen garden near the house in which she raised beets, cabbages, beans, tomatoes, and other vegetables to take away the curse of bareness from their table.
The first big job of the season came in May. This was the tobacco setting. Late in February Jerry had made the tobacco bed. It was nine feet by sixty feet and it lay in a sheltered hollow sloping gently to the south. To kill the weed seeds Jerry had burnt the bed by covering it with old fence rails and setting them on fire. Then he had raked the ashes into the ground and made the earth as fine and smooth as sand. Into this he had sowed the small, almost microscopic seed, had tramped it well into the ground and spread over the whole a tightly stretched covering of cheesecloth to protect the young plants from wind and frost. According to the custom of tenant farmers' wives in the tobacco country, Judith had planted on the edges seed of tomatoes, peppers, and cabbages to make plants for the home garden.