“Harriet, give me my tambour-frame,” she said. Harriet obediently drew forth Laban from his cupboard, and removed the sheltering tissue-paper. “I wonder could I do a stitch or two,” said Mevrouw Mopius, dolefully. She sat trying to thread a big needle with shaky fingers. Harriet waited a moment, watching her.
“Let me do it,” suggested Harriet at last.
But Aunt Sarah resented this interference.
“I wasn’t attending,” she said, angrily; “I was thinking of something else. Surely you don’t imagine I couldn’t thread a needle?”
And as she still continued trying, pitifully, tremblingly, her niece turned impatiently away.
“Do you know,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, contemplating the gaudy flare of patriarchs and camels, “I have been thinking that I should like to give it, if I can finish it, to Ursula Rovers for a wedding-present. She admired it very much when she was here. She was the only person that ever admired it.” Her voice became quite sorrowful.
“Dominé Pock admired it,” said Harriet, soothingly.
“Yes, after dining here!” exclaimed the invalid, with a flash of grim humor. “He said Jacob must have had just such a face as that. Now, Harriet, that was flattery. For Jacob couldn’t have had exactly that sort of face.” Indeed, had the countenance of the patriarch blazed in such continuous scarlet, his uncle could never have engaged him to look after cows.
“Besides, Pock doesn’t really know about Jacob’s face,” continued Mevrouw Mopius, with a sick person’s insistence, “for I asked him myself if we had an authentic photograph”—she meant “portrait”—“and he said we hadn’t. Though we have of Joseph, he said. It seems a very great pity. I should have liked to do it from the life.”
Mevrouw Mopius sank into aggrieved consideration of the father’s remissness about sitting for his likeness as compared with the foresight shown by the son.