“He said he'd love to show it all to me!” Evelina declared as Ann Eliza conned her glowing face. “Did you ever hear anything so silly? I didn't know which way to look.”
Ann Eliza received this confidence with a sympathetic murmur.
“My bonnet is becoming, isn't it?” Evelina went on irrelevantly, smiling at her reflection in the cracked glass above the chest of drawers.
“You're jest lovely,” said Ann Eliza.
Spring was making itself unmistakably known to the distrustful New Yorker by an increased harshness of wind and prevalence of dust, when one day Evelina entered the back room at supper-time with a cluster of jonquils in her hand.
“I was just that foolish,” she answered Ann Eliza's wondering glance, “I couldn't help buyin' 'em. I felt as if I must have something pretty to look at right away.”
“Oh, sister,” said Ann Eliza, in trembling sympathy. She felt that special indulgence must be conceded to those in Evelina's state since she had had her own fleeting vision of such mysterious longings as the words betrayed.
Evelina, meanwhile, had taken the bundle of dried grasses out of the broken china vase, and was putting the jonquils in their place with touches that lingered down their smooth stems and blade-like leaves.
“Ain't they pretty?” she kept repeating as she gathered the flowers into a starry circle. “Seems as if spring was really here, don't it?”
Ann Eliza remembered that it was Mr. Ramy's evening.