Occasionally Kate wandered into the sewing-room in the rather vague way that had come to her recently, quite unlike her usual brisk alertness.
"What are you up to, you and Mag?" she asked on one of these occasions. "You seem to be turning out garments by the wholesale." She fingered the dainty pile of fineries on the bed. "What a pretty petticoat! And a peignoir to match. How grand they are! And what's this—no sleeves in it, no waist to speak of—Why, it's a ball-dress! Where in the world have you ever seen a ball-dress, Jemmy girl?"
"In a magazine." Jemima spoke rather anxiously, with a mouth full of pins. "Does it look all right, Mother? Did you use to wear as—as little as that at a ball?"
"Well, not quite as little, perhaps," murmured Kate—the frock in her hand was of the Empire period. "Fashions change, however, and it looks very pretty. But what do you need with such a dress at Storm, dear?"
The girl said rather tensely, "Mother, do you expect Jacqueline and me to spend the rest of our lives at Storm?"
Kate's eyes dropped. "No," she answered in a low voice. She wondered whether the time had come to make the announcement she dreaded.
"Well, then!" said Jemima with a breath of relief. "You see I believe in being forehanded. Young ladies in society need lots of clothes, don't they?"
"You are not exactly young ladies in society."
"Not yet. But we mean to be," said Jemima, quietly.
Kate winced. She had not forgotten it, the thing her daughter called "society"; the little, cruel, careless, prurient world she had left far behind her and thought well lost. To Jemima it meant balls and beaux and gaiety. To her it meant the faces of women, life-long friends, turned upon her blank and frozen as she walked down a church aisle carrying the child she had named for her lover. Wider, kinder worlds were open to her children, surely, the world of books, of travel, of new acquaintance. But the thing Jemima craved, the simple, trivial, pleasure-filled neighborhood life that made her own girlhood bright to remember—of this she had deprived her children forever.