"I'll help you with that sewing." Mrs. Spencer threaded her needle. "You've done your shopping in a lump, haven't you? I thought you usually made some of these things."
"I won't have time this year."
Catherine was half afraid to tell her. Her proposition sounded absurd, as if she heard it through her mother's ears. But Mrs. Spencer listened quietly.
"That's what Charles meant, then," she said.
"He spoke of it?" Catherine looked up.
"He asked if I had heard how modern you had suddenly become."
Catherine snapped her thread. She wondered why she had felt this desperate need to make her mother approve of her scheme, and Charles, too. Wouldn't approval come after she had carried it through, if she could?
"Do you think me foolish—or wicked?"
Mrs. Spencer patted the tape into place on the blouse she held.
"Not at all, Cathy," she said.