“I’m not,” said Sarah, laughing; “it’s you that are talking. You haven’t sewed a stitch for five minutes, either.”
Gypsy sighed, and her needle began to fly savagely. There was a little silence.
“You see,” said Gypsy, breaking it, “I’m trying to reform.”
“Reform?” said Sarah, with some vague ideas of Luther and Melancthon, and Gypsy’s wearing a wig and spectacles, and reading Cruden’s “Concordance.”
“Yes,” nodded Gypsy, “reform. I never knew anybody need it as much as I. I never do things anyway, and then I do them wrong, and then I forget all about them. Mother says I’m improving. She says my room used to look like a perfect Babel, and now I keep the wardrobe door shut, and dust it out—sometimes. Then there’s my mending. I came out here so’s to be quiet and keep at it. The poor dear woman is so afraid I won’t learn to do things in a lady-like way. It would be dreadful not to grow up a lady, wouldn’t it?”
“Dreadful!” said Sarah; “only I wish you’d hurry and get through, so we can go down to the swamp and sail. Couldn’t you take a little bigger stitches?”
“No,” said Gypsy, resolutely; “I should have to rip it all out. I’m going to do it right, if it takes me all day.”
Gypsy began to sew with a will, and Sarah, finding it was for her own interest in the end, stopped talking; so the fearful seam was soon neatly finished, the work folded up, and the thimble and scissors put away carefully in the little green reticule.
“I lose so many thimbles,—you don’t know!” observed Gypsy, by way of comment. “I’m going to see if I can’t keep this one three months.”
“Now let’s go,” said Sarah.