"Here's Dora, the dress-model," she said cheerfully. "She adjusts." In proof she began to screw Dora down and in to required proportions, measuring her by Joy, who watched operations with fascinated eyes.
"I never knew you could sew," she said.
"My father was a country minister," Mrs. Harrington explained, flinging the green frock, inside out, over the steely shoulders of Dora, the dress-frame. "I cook very nicely, if I do say it myself, and till I was seventeen I did every bit of my own sewing."
"And were you married at seventeen?"
"No," Phyllis answered, stopping a moment from her pinnings and speaking more gravely. "My father died then, and I went to work. I hadn't time to sew after that—I bought ready-made things. So when I was married—that was a long seven years afterwards—I did have such lovely times buying organdies and laces and things and cutting them out and making them! That was the summer Allan was getting well."
She stared off at the wall for a moment, as she knelt up against the green satin. "That was the loveliest summer I ever had—excepting every one since."
She laughed a little, then prevented herself from further speech by putting a frieze of pins in her mouth and beginning to do something with the dress with them, one by one.
"Do you mind cutting into this?" she asked when that row was gone.
"The more the better!" said Joy with enthusiasm.
"It will make a stunning frock, with the silver net draped over the pale-green satin... M'm. That silver iridescent girdle on the other dress—the violet—can I have that, too?"