“You mustn’t tell Chrissie that I heard anything, Polly,” Winifred said, suddenly. “Mother told Aunt Nellie she particularly did not want Chrissie to be worried.”
“I’m not a sneak,” was Polly’s retort.
She was thinking little things over in her mind. There had been a great difference of late in her home, things had been wanted very badly, and had remained wanting. Two or three of the maids had been sent away. The lessons she and Winifred had been taking with fashionable masters had ceased in the autumn, and though more studies were spoken of, they were not begun yet.
Oh, yes, there had been many changes in the current of their life this past year. The only thing that had remained unchanged, Polly determined, had been the characteristics of the detestable Monday mornings with the dusting, and arranging and the elements of anger and dissatisfaction throughout the house.
And for this fact, Polly in her thinking, felt as if she had lighted on a truth, too.
Who knew how much care and real trouble had lain closed up in those tradesmen’s books for her poor little mother! trouble that had to be faced and met each Monday morning? How could she tell now, with Winifred’s neat little story of their poverty ringing in her ears, what a weight of anxiety might not have underlain those wordy arguments her mother had fought out with a succession of cooks?
Polly darned her rug slowly, while Winifred having finished her tasks sat down in her own prim fashion in her own prim armchair and continued her discourse.
“I think, too, that father has had to pay a lot of money for Harold this year. I must say I have always thought it silly of father to send Harold abroad. Boys always do get money spent on them so freely.”
There was a decided touch of prettiness about Winifred Pennington as she sat with her small, white hands—Winifred wore gloves to save her hands on all occasions—folded demurely together on her lap, and her wealth of hair—maybe of a tone that was a trifle colorless—arranged about her little head in countless plaits, a custom that is out of fashion nowadays, yet that suited her. Winifred’s eyes were gray, like Polly’s, but how unlike! and her features were as regular as her natural instincts.
“Harold is a duck,” Polly interposed, warmly.