"Them 'll streak when they dry," said Mrs. Morris, in the discriminating tone of one who knows.
Judith wondered vaguely where she had seen that peculiar purple colour; later she remembered that the outside of the tin pail Tommy Slick carried, had been smeared with it.
Hiram Green greeted them from his shop door as they passed, and Bill Aikins' wife gave them a brisk salutation, without pausing in her work of "sweeping up" her door steps. They passed the school-house; the children were out at recess. Mrs. Morris' brow contracted, and her voice was a little querulous when she spoke next.
"Seems to me children grow powerful noisy these times," she said. "I disremember that they used to be so when I was little."
They turned the corner. Hiram Green's house was the last one in the village. It was a brick house, built flush with the street. It had six windows in front, and these windows had been considered very original and genteel, when Hiram had them put in. For, instead of being the ordinary oblong windows, the tops of these were semicircular. Hiram had intended at first to have the semicircle filled with glass, but decided, from economic reasons, to substitute wood. These wooden tops conveyed the impression of the windows having eyebrows, and gave a supercilious air to the whole house, which was a very good indication of the attitude of Hiram Green and his daughters to their neighbours. There was a Mrs. Green, but she was one of those hard-worked nonentities, never considered in the polity of the household save as a labour-saving agent. The Misses Green were usually to be seen on a fine afternoon either on the "stoop," or by the open parlour windows. Mrs. Green was never visible; she was obliterated beneath the burden of work she bore upon her patient shoulders.
The Misses Green were out in force as Judith and Mrs. Morris went by. Enshrined in their midst was a sallow young Methodist clergyman, somewhat meagre-looking, but with a countenance full of content. He fairly gaped after Judith. Mrs. Morris greeted the Misses Green coldly. She did not like them. Their mother and Mrs. Morris had been friends in girlhood, and Mrs. Morris had a poor opinion of her old friend's daughters. "Hester Green's got no spunk or she would not stand it," she said with asperity, and added, "Poor thing!"
Mrs. Green's wistful eyes looked at them from the kitchen window, where she was frying crullers for the minister's tea. But she did not think of her own lot as being harder than Mrs. Morris'—far from it.
"Poor Jane, trapesing along with a strange girl, and me got four daughters," she said to herself, and dropped a bit of potato into the bubbling fat to see if it was at the proper temperature.
Perhaps Mrs. Green's daughters as well as their "ways" were rocks of offence to Mrs. Morris, yet they were truly a poor possession to covet.
A short walk, and then Judith and Mrs. Morris were at the foot of the hill-side. They entered Andrew's domain; and found, as they closed the gate, that Miss Myers and Andrew had come to meet them.