“Like as not; like as not!” agreed pa.
That ma had other things on her mind was very certain. She went poking over chests and drawers, searching for something, and at last she came on some undyed homespun cotton of her own weaving. She sat for several minutes with this on her knees, looking at it. At last she called Azalea to her.
“I’ve half a mind to use that there blue dye Mis’ Leiter brought over, to color this here, so’s I can run up a dress for you, Azalea. I can’t have you go down to town looking like a scarecrow, and I ’clare to goodness, I’m prejudiced against having you go down in that outgrown dress you had on when I saw you first. Why, your arms and legs stuck out like the turkey legs on a platter. It ain’t fitten for you to go that way.”
“It does seem like you have to go to an awful lot of trouble for me, ma’am,” murmured the girl. “And anyway, you couldn’t get that done for to-morrow.”
Ma muttered something to herself which Azalea could not catch, and the next minute Mrs. McBirney was away down to the spring, building a fire, putting over a pot, and showing that she was in for what Jim called “one of her spells.”
“When ma has a spell of work,” he told Azalea, “nothing in this world can stop her.”
It couldn’t have been more than an hour later that the good, well-made stuff, dyed a rich, dark blue, was whipping on the line in the wind. An hour after that it was pressed and ready to be cut out; and before Azalea could realize what had happened, ma was fitting the waist of a new dress to her.
“I always had a knack of snipping things out,” she told Azalea, “and since I bought that there sewing machine with my egg money, I can run a thing up in no time. As luck will have it, I’ve got some crocheted edging that will look well on the neck and sleeves.”
A minute later she broke out:
“See here, Azalea, you don’t want hot, tight sleeves coming down to your wrist, like you was an old woman! I keep my eyes peeled when I go down to Lee, and I notice them girls at the hotel wears their sleeves about up to their elbows. I don’t say you want yours hiked up quite that high, but we’ll have them somewheres betwixt and between, shan’t we?”