“It's not very smart of her without being paid more. They'll just put anything on you they can in this stingy place. I can tell you I wouldn't do two men's work for a woman's pay. I'm awful glad Jason's coming back soon, Olive, with all that money, and I can go to Boston and study singing.”
“I've said over and over, Rhoda,” Olive replied patiently, “that you mustn't think and talk all the time about Jason's worldly success. It doesn't sound nice, but like we were all trying to get everything we could out of him before ever he's here.”
“Didn't he say in the last letter that I was to go to Boston?” Rhoda exclaimed impatiently. “Didn't he just up and tell me that? Why, with all the gold Jason's got it won't mean anything for him to send me away. It isn't as if I wouldn't pay you all back for the trouble I've been. I know I can sing, and I'll work harder than ever Hester dreamed of——”
As if materialized by the pronunciation of her name, the latter entered the room. “Gracious, Hester,” Rhoda declared distastefully, making a nose, “you smell of dead haddock right this minute.” Hester, unlike Rhoda's softly rounded proportions, was more bony than Olive, infinitely more colorless, although ten years the younger. She had a black worsted scarf over her drab head in place of a hat, its ends wrapped about her meager shoulders and bombazine waist. Without preliminary she dropped into her place at the supper table, the shawl trailing on the broad, uneven boards of the floor.
“The wind's smartening up on the bay,” she told them. “Captain Eagleston looks for half a blow. It has got cold, too. I wish the tea'd be ready when I get in from the packing house. It seems that much could be done, with Olive only sitting around and Rhoda singing to herself in the mirror on her dresser.”
“It'll draw in a minute more,” Olive said in the door from the kitchen, beyond the fireplace. Rhoda smiled cheerfully.
“I suppose,” Hester went on, in a voice without emphasis that yet contrived to be thinly bitter, “you were all talking about what would happen when Jason came home with that fortune of his. Far as I can see he's promised and provided for everybody, Jem and Rhoda and his parents and Olive, every Tom and Noddy, but me.”
“I don't like to keep on about it,” Olive protested, pained. “Yet you can't see, Hester, how independent you are. A person wouldn't like to offer you anything until you had signified. You were never very nice with Jason anyway.”
“Well, I'm not going to be nicer after he's back with gold in his pocket. I guess he'll find I'm not hanging on his shoulder for a cashmere dress or a trip to Boston.”
“Pa ought to get into Salem soon,” Rhoda observed. “He said after this he wasn't going to ship again, even along the coast, but tally fish for Mr. Burrage. Pa's getting old.”