She assented to please him, and then kissed his forehead with a lingering, adoring tenderness, marvelling that such a sufferer could so think for others. Then she went quietly to bed, feeling, as the gaunt spinster had tried to put it, “If you can bear your ills so, surely I might manage to bear mine more courageously.”
CHAPTER XIX
The next evening Ethel crossed the little landing to the lonely flat, and gave the invitation from F to G.
A good deal to her amusement, she found the gaunt spinster knitting babies’ socks, with a basket containing several completed pairs beside her. She picked a pair up, and said with a kind little smile:
“I hardly expected to find you doing this.”
“Of course not,” in a short way, that sounded uncivil without being so. “It’s an occupation about as much suited to me as teaching music.”
“I wonder why you do it?”
“I do it for bread, naturally. They bring in a few shillings. It is just a fluke that I can make them at all. I know as much about a needle ordinarily as a flying-machine; but I learnt to knit once under protest. I sprained my ankle and was laid up for some weeks, and I told the doctor I should go stark, staring mad if he kept me shut up in a house doing nothing. He said knitting was a very good preventive to madness, and he’d send his wife along. She was a great missionary worker, and she pounced on me like a hawk, and started me off knitting socks for little gutta-percha babies somewhere in the Antipodes, almost before I knew where I was. Such insanity!… as if white babies wanted to be bothered with socks, much less black ones! I told the doctor it was adding insult to injury to allow it to appear I hadn’t more common sense than to occupy my time with garments for the heathen. As if there weren’t too many garments in the world already, half the community over-dressed, and ready to sell its soul for more. ‘Leave them clean and healthy and naked, that’s my advice, doctor,’ I told him; ‘and if you weren’t afraid of your wife you’d agree.’”
Ethel leaned against the table, enjoying the rugged face and comically twisted mouth.
“But I thought you were a clergyman’s daughter?” she said.