"Then what did she do?"
"She said what she had done she had done for the best, but it was always her fate to be misunderstood, so she supposed she must take it as her cross and not complain. She had endeavoured not to let her left hand know what her right hand was doing, and this was the consequence. Oh! she was terribly hurt, was Eliza Ann—and no wonder!—when the young minister told her that, according to his ideas, trousers (like opinions) should not be one-sided. It was so painful, she said, when men reviled her and condemned her, after she had acted as she thought for the best."
"What was the end of it all?" Joanna asked.
"The end was, miss, that Brother Phipson heard what had happened, and gave another roll of cloth to make the other legs; so that all things worked together for good, and there was double the number of pairs that there would have been if the cutting-out had not been done by Eliza Ann."
"She really must have been a gifted person!"
"Oh! Eliza Ann was a godly woman, and no mistake," confessed Martha, with pardonable pride, "and still is, I doubt not, a sea-voyage having no power to change the human heart. But she was none too easy to get on with, when things were going smooth. Though I say it as shouldn't—being her sister—there were times when Eliza Ann's religion was trying to the flesh of them she had to do with."
"Did her husband think it so?" queried Joanna.
"Oh, my dear, what a question to ask! As if it mattered what he thought! Eliza Ann was far too sensible to allow him to give his opinion about anything. 'If you let a husband begin to pass remarks,' she used to say, 'it is the thin end of the wedge which in time will turn again and rend you.' So Eliza Ann avoided the first appearance of evil."
"But she was really good, you say?"
"Good, my dear? Of course she was good! Who ever thought anything different?" exclaimed Martha, who had never read Milton's line, "He for God only; she for God in him," and would have called it "rubbish" if she had. "I assure you, miss, Eliza Ann was not one to keep the outside of the cup and platter clean, while the inside was filled with ravening wolves and dead men's bones. Though she might be aggravating, as it were, in times of prosperity, in the day of adversity she never failed nor fell short."