“Oh, who would have brothers?” she asked her image in the glass; but it only looked back at her and smiled mournfully.
[113]
]CHAPTER X.
NEEDLES AND PINS.
“Something attempted, something done.”
Snip, snip. Bits of silesia and common red cashmere worked their way to the edge of the table, and from there dropped to the floor where there was a glorious litter. Buzz, buzz, bang against the window-panes went the body and wings of a great “meat” fly. Whirr, whirr, the sewing-machine fled frantically over the silesia in the places where the scissors had gone snip, snip. From the trees across the road came the maddening sound of many locusts; the great fly on the hot window-glass was half killing itself in the effort to outdo them in noise.
“What ever was she?” sighed Miss Mabelle Jones.
She got up from the machine with a length of grey webbing in her hand, and looked absently about for a few minutes. She had written the [114] ]measurement of a customer’s waist on the back of a card of buttons, she remembered; but the question was, where were the buttons?
“If only he had money of his own now,” she said aloud, which had no apparent connection with waist measurements, but showed that dressmakers’ thoughts occasionally run on other things besides gatherings, crossway flounces, and boned bodices. Then she found the card in the leaves of the Young Ladies’ Journal; and the comment, “Thirty-five inches, fat old thing,” had a connection.
She held the webbing against the tape measure, and cut it off at thirty-five with quite a vicious little snip.
“Stuck up things,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t be seen in the plain, common dresses they wear for anything—no style at all. Why, Miss Woolcot’s at church on Sunday was just fourpence-ha’penny print, and nothing else.”
Then she gasped, and put down the underskirt she was making in a great hurry. Just outside the window stood Miss Woolcot herself, looking half-hesitatingly at the fly-spotted card that said “Miss Mabelle Jones, Costumiere and Modiste.” The next minute the knocker sounded.