“Oh,” sez she, “I had them for work all summer; I begun ’em the 1st of June, so I could be sure to get them done for Christmas. I think that I could have done them in two months if I had worked all the time.”
And I sez to myself, all these long golden summer hours, sweet with bird-song, fragrant with flowers and beauty, she had sot over her one-hundred-and-twenty thread patiently weavin’ cobwebs, hopin’ mebby to ketch Happiness in it; but ’tennyrate doin’ this slow work, stitch by stitch, and lettin’ all the beauty and glory of summer and life go by. For I begun to see plainer than ever why Louis Arnold wuz a defaulter in the bank of love.
“Afterwards in her room,” sez Fidelia, “I want you to see the slippers she has embroidered for Louis—I never see the beat of it; they are so fine you can’t tell where the stitches are put; each one took her three weeks of stiddy work; they are a design of pink roses on a sky-blue ground.”
Sez I, “She could have bought a pair for five dollars that would have done jest as well, and I would have loved to have seen some of the pink roses on her cheeks, and some of the bright sky-blue in her eyes. They used to look like bits of the sky peeping out of rosy clouds.” (Them wuz her cheeks in metafor.) “But they look faded now, Fidelia,” sez I—“dretful faded and wore out.”
“Yes,” sez she, “she has injured her eyesight this summer—injured it a sight. She has sot up till midnight, night after night, workin’, for fear she wouldn’t git ’em done in time. And then,” sez she, bustin’ out into a confidential tone, “she has cried a good deal. Oh, Samantha,” sez she, “you don’t know how much that girl is a-sufferin’. There she is, jest the same as engaged, and she jest as faithful as the north star to the pole, and he growin’ cool all the time and indifferent.”
“Well,” sez I, “the stiddy faithfulness of the star can’t be changed, Fidelia, nor the coldness of the north pole, for it is the nater of that pole to be frigid, and we can’t do anything to warm it up. But,” sez I, “as for this matter of Elinor and Louis Arnold, I believe my soul that I could make a change in their doin’s if I had my way.”
“Oh, dear Samantha! Could you, could you?” sez Fidelia, a-wipin’ up her tears and lookin’ some brighter.
“But,” sez I, sort of lookin’ off mentally some distance, “it hain’t no ways likely that she would do what I would want her to.”
“Oh, she would!” sez Fidelia.
“I would, I would!” cried Elinor, advancin’ from behind the porchair. “Forgive me; I wuz behind the curtain a-catchin’ the last daylight on these slippers, and I overheard your talk. I will do jest as you say, for my heart is breakin’, Aunt Samantha,” sez she. They always auntied and uncled us, our children did, Fidelia’s and mine. “I will do jest what you tell me to,” sez she, standin’ before me, tears streamin’ down her white cheeks, her work-box in one hand, and the oncompleted slipper a-danglin’ in the other.