“I tell you I can't, Anna,” Carroll replied. “I used the money as it came on those bills for the wedding. There is very little left.” Then he had hurriedly scrawled the check, which she took in spite of her incredulousness of its worth. Therefore Charlotte, when the check had been offered her for a new hat, for Anna had carelessly passed it over to her sister-in-law, had eagerly taken it to pay Anderson.
“I paid the grocery bill,” Charlotte told her aunt when she returned.
Anna was in her own room, engaged in an unusual task. She was setting things to rights, and hanging her clothes regularly in her closet, and packing her bureau drawers. Charlotte looked at her in astonishment after she had made the statement concerning the grocery bill.
“What are you doing, Anna?” said she.
Anna looked up from a snarl of lace and ribbons and gloves in a bureau drawer. “I am putting things in order,” said she.
Then Mrs. Carroll crossed the hall from her opposite room, and entered, trailing a soft, pink, China-silk dressing-gown. She sank into a chair with a swirl of lace ruffles and viewed her sister-in-law with a comical air of childish dismay. “Don't you feel well, Anna, dear?” asked she.
“Yes. Why?” replied Anna Carroll, folding a yard of blue ribbon.
“Nothing, only I have always heard that if a person does something she has never done before, something at variance with her character, it is a very bad sign, and I never knew you to put things in order before, Anna, dear.”
“Order is not at variance with my character,” said Anna. “It is one of my fundamental principles.”
“You never carried it out,” said Mrs. Carroll. “You know you never did, Anna. Your bureau drawers have always looked like a sort of chaos of civilization, just like mine. You know you never carried out the principle, Anna, dear.”