“Let me see, how many did you make?” asked Mrs. Berry.
“She made two dozen pair,” Charlotte's mother answered for her.
“An' you've got 'em all laid away, yellowin'?”
“I guess they ain't yellowed much,” said Sarah Barnard.
“I don't see when you're ever goin' to use 'em.”
“Mebbe there'd be chances enough to use 'em if some folks was as crazy to take up with 'em as some other folks,” returned Sarah Barnard.
“I'd like to know what you mean?”
“Oh, nothin'. If folks want chances to make pillow-slips bad enough there's generally poor tools enough layin' 'round, that's all.”
“I'd like to know what you mean, Sarah Barnard.”
“Oh, I don't mean nothin',” answered Sarah Barnard. She glanced at her daughter Charlotte and smiled slyly, but Charlotte never returned the glance and smile. She sewed steadily. Rose colored, but she said nothing. She looked very pretty and happy, as she sat there, sewing knitted lace on her wedding-pillows; and she really was happy. Her passionate heart had really satisfied itself with the boyish lover whom she would have despised except for lack of a better. She was and would be happy enough; it was only a question of deterioration of character, and the nobility of applying to the need of love the rules of ordinary hunger and thirst, and eating contentedly the crust when one could not get the pie, of drinking the water when one could not get the wine. Contentment may be sometimes a degradation; but she was happier than she had ever been in her life, although she had a little sense of humiliation when she reflected that Tommy Ray, younger than herself, tending store under her brother, was not exactly a brilliant match for her, and that everybody in the village would think so. So she colored angrily when her aunt Sarah spoke as she did, although she said nothing. But her mother, although she had rebelled in private bitterly against her daughter's choice, was ready enough to take up the cudgels for her in public.