“It’s,” said Betty, peering up at the timepiece, for the room was already growing dusky, “it’s a quarter or twenty minutes past four. There’s one thing I do thank papa for,” she added, speaking more briskly at the prospect of afternoon-tea in ten minutes, “that he keeps the clocks going correctly. It would be too horrible if they were all standing still and out of repair. Frances,” she went on, “it’s a worn-out subject, I’m afraid, but can you think of any way in which we three, or any one of us, could make a little money? It has come into my head so this afternoon how delightful it would be to brighten up this room a little. Even the thought of old Milne looking in makes me long for it to be rather more like other people’s.”
Before this, Frances, who rarely allowed her hands to be idle, had ensconced herself in a corner as near a window as she could manage, anxious to benefit by the last remains of daylight for a beautiful bit of embroidery, which represented her special fancy work, and this for practical reasons. Her materials were of the simplest, being merely white lawn and embroidery cotton, with which, nevertheless, thanks to her quickness at transferring designs, she was often able to add beauty to her younger sisters’ otherwise undecorated attire.
Before replying, she glanced at her handiwork.
“Personally, I can think of nothing but my work,” she said. “But there are such beautiful imitations of hand embroidery nowadays that I don’t believe I should get much for it, so that really it’s better to use it ourselves; and I must say that the first thing I want money for is to help us to be better dressed, rather than our drawing-room.”
She looked at her sisters regretfully. Nature had not done badly by either of them, and each had a distinct style of her own, which, however, even their sister’s partial eyes could not but own was shown to the very smallest advantage by the chefs d’oeuvre of Miss Tobias, the village seamstress, who spent a few days at Fir Cottage two or three times a year for the purpose of manipulating new material, or transmogrifying old, into clothes for the sisters’ wear.
“Yes,” said Betty, agreeing with the expression she saw in her sister’s eyes, “we are atrociously dressed: there’s no other word for it I know; and what makes it doubly hard to bear is the old story. If mamma would allow us even fifteen pounds a year each, in our own hands, there would be some hope of better things. I am sure we could manage better, but as things are it is quite hopeless. That was what made me speak of this room instead of ourselves.”
Frances sighed and folded up her work for the time, for there came the welcome sound of the tea-tray and its contents.
“They both might look so pretty,” she thought to herself. She watched Betty’s slight figure as she helped to arrange the cups and saucers with her little white hands, and Eira’s lovely hair as it glimmered and glowed in the firelight. “How is it that people will see things with such different eyes? If mamma could but see them as I do! and how, comparatively speaking, small effort might make them and their lives so different.”
For Frances thought a great deal more than she expressed. She had an almost morbid terror of adding or exaggerating any new grounds of discontent to the two, who often seemed to her more her children than her sisters, slight as was in reality the difference of age which separated her from them.
An approaching rustle—somehow or other their father always announced his advent by a rustle; this time it was that of the afternoon paper he had just opened—made her look up in expectation of some request or complaint. This time, by good luck, it was the former.