“Of course, what we can do here”—she began with less eagerness of tone, thinking aloud rather than addressing Tabitha—“must at best be on a very small scale. You must not be frightened by the book, where everything is done with fairy prodigality, and the lowest figures dealt with are hundreds of thousands. I only want you to read it that you may catch the spirit of it, and so understand how I feel. And you needn’t worry about my wasting money, or doing anything foolish, you dear, timid old soul!”
Miss Wilcox, in her revolving mental processes, had somehow veered around to an attitude of moderate sympathy with the project, the while she listened to these words. “I’m sure you won’t, my dear,” she replied, quite sweetly. “And I daresay there can really be a great deal of good done, only, of course, it will have to be gone at cautiously and by degrees. And we must let old Runkle do the papering and whitewashing; don’t forget that. He’s had ever so much sickness in his family all the winter, and work is so slack.”
“Do you know, I like your Mr. Tracy!” was Kate’s irrelevant reply. She made it musingly, as if the idea were new to her mind.
“You can see for yourself there couldn’t have been anything at all in that spiteful Sarah Cheese-borough’s talk about him and her,” said Tabitha, who now felt herself to have been all along the champion of this injured couple. “How on earth a respectable woman can invent such slanders beats my comprehension.”
Kate Minster laughed merrily aloud. “It’s lucky you weren’t made of pancake batter, Tabitha,” she said with mock gravity; “for, if you had been, you never could have stood this being stirred both ways. You would have turned heavy and been spoiled.”
“Instead of which I live to spoil other people, eh?” purred the gratified old lady, shaking her curls with affectionate pride.
“If we weren’t out in the street, I believe I should kiss you, Tabitha,” said the girl. “You can’t begin to imagine how delightfully you have behaved today!”