The Old Lady thought it a most beautiful June. She no longer hated the new days; on the contrary, she welcomed them.
“Every day is an uncommon day now,” she said jubilantly to herself—for did not almost every day bring her a glimpse of Sylvia? Even on rainy days the Old Lady gallantly braved rheumatism to hide behind her clump of dripping spruces and watch Sylvia pass. The only days she could not see her were Sundays; and no Sundays had ever seemed so long to Old Lady Lloyd as those June Sundays did.
One day the egg pedlar had news for her.
“The music teacher is going to sing a solo for a collection piece to-morrow,” he told her.
The Old Lady’s black eyes flashed with interest.
“I didn’t know Miss Gray was a member of the choir,” she said.
“Jined two Sundays ago. I tell you, our music is something worth listening to now. The church’ll be packed to-morrow, I reckon—her name’s gone all over the country for singing. You ought to come and hear it, Miss Lloyd.”
The pedlar said this out of bravado, merely to show he wasn’t scared of the Old Lady, for all her grand airs. The Old Lady made no answer, and he thought he had offended her. He went away, wishing he hadn’t said it. Had he but known it, the Old Lady had forgotten the existence of all and any egg pedlars. He had blotted himself and his insignificance out of her consciousness by his last sentence. All her thoughts, feelings, and wishes were submerged in a very whirlpool of desire to hear Sylvia sing that solo. She went into the house in a tumult and tried to conquer that desire. She could not do it, even thought she summoned all her pride to her aid. Pride said:
“You will have to go to church to hear her. You haven’t fit clothes to go to church in. Think what a figure you will make before them all.”
But, for the first time, a more insistent voice than pride spoke to her soul—and, for the first time, the Old Lady listened to it. It was too true that she had never gone to church since the day on which she had to begin wearing her mother’s silk dresses. The Old Lady herself thought that this was very wicked; and she tried to atone by keeping Sunday very strictly, and always having a little service of her own, morning and evening. She sang three hymns in her cracked voice, prayed aloud, and read a sermon. But she could not bring herself to go to church in her out-of-date clothes—she, who had once set the fashions in Spencervale, and the longer she stayed away, the more impossible it seemed that she should ever again go. Now the impossible had become, not only possible, but insistent. She must go to church and hear Sylvia sing, no matter how ridiculous she appeared, no matter how people talked and laughed at her.