“And your plain sewing is so beautiful, Maggie,” said Lucy, “that I think I shall beg a few specimens of you to show as fancy-work. Your exquisite sewing is quite a mystery to me, you used to dislike that sort of work so much in old days.”
“It is a mystery easily explained, dear,” said Maggie, looking up quietly. “Plain sewing was the only thing I could get money by, so I was obliged to try and do it well.”
Lucy, good and simple as she was, could not help blushing a little. She did not quite like that Stephen should know that; Maggie need not have mentioned it. Perhaps there was some pride in the confession,—the pride of poverty that will not be ashamed of itself. But if Maggie had been the queen of coquettes she could hardly have invented a means of giving greater piquancy to her beauty in Stephen’s eyes; I am not sure that the quiet admission of plain sewing and poverty would have done alone, but assisted by the beauty, they made Maggie more unlike other women even than she had seemed at first.
“But I can knit, Lucy,” Maggie went on, “if that will be of any use for your bazaar.”
“Oh yes, of infinite use. I shall set you to work with scarlet wool to-morrow. But your sister is the most enviable person,” continued Lucy, turning to Stephen, “to have the talent of modelling. She is doing a wonderful bust of Dr Kenn entirely from memory.”
“Why, if she can remember to put the eyes very near together, and the corners of the mouth very far apart, the likeness can hardly fail to be striking in St Ogg’s.”
“Now that is very wicked of you,” said Lucy, looking rather hurt. “I didn’t think you would speak disrespectfully of Dr Kenn.”
“I say anything disrespectful of Dr Kenn? Heaven forbid! But I am not bound to respect a libellous bust of him. I think Kenn one of the finest fellows in the world. I don’t care much about the tall candlesticks he has put on the communion-table, and I shouldn’t like to spoil my temper by getting up to early prayers every morning. But he’s the only man I ever knew personally who seems to me to have anything of the real apostle in him,—a man who has eight hundred a-year and is contented with deal furniture and boiled beef because he gives away two-thirds of his income. That was a very fine thing of him,—taking into his house that poor lad Grattan, who shot his mother by accident. He sacrifices more time than a less busy man could spare, to save the poor fellow from getting into a morbid state of mind about it. He takes the lad out with him constantly, I see.”
“That is beautiful,” said Maggie, who had let her work fall, and was listening with keen interest. “I never knew any one who did such things.”
“And one admires that sort of action in Kenn all the more,” said Stephen, “because his manners in general are rather cold and severe. There’s nothing sugary and maudlin about him.”