"I am dressed just right for work."
"Oh no," she said pleasantly. "I am dressed just right for ordinary work. Why, mother, my dress cost less than Dorothy's; hers is part woollen, and mine is nothing but cotton."
This remark brought Dorothy's eyes from her work; and fixed them in admiring wonder on the well-dressed lady before her. Being utterly unacquainted with materials and grades of quality, and judging of dress only by its effects, it was like a bewildering revelation that the dress which to her looked elegant, cost less than her own. There flashed just then into her heart the possibility that some day she too might have something pretty.
Louise did not wait for her revelation to be commented upon, but drew nearer to the workers. Mrs. Morgan was sewing rapidly on a dingy calico for herself.
"Oh, let me make the button-holes," said, or rather exclaimed, the new daughter, as though it were to be counted a privilege. "I can make beautiful ones, and I always made mother's and Estelle's."
Now, it so happened that Mrs. Morgan, with all her deftness with the needle, and she had considerable, was not skilled in that difficult branch of needle-work, the making of button-holes. Moreover, though she considered it an element of weakness, and would by no means have acknowledged it, she hated the work with an absolute hatred, born of a feeling, strong in such natures as hers, of aversion toward anything which they cannot do as well, if not better, than others. The thought of securing well-made button-holes, over which she had not to struggle, came with a sense of rest to her soul, and she answered, more kindly than Louise had heard her speak before,—
"Oh, I don't want you to bother with my button-holes."
"I shall not," said Louise brightly. "Button-holes never bother me; I like to work them as well as some people like to do embroidery."
Then she went to the sink in the kitchen, and washed her hands in the bright tin basin, and dried them on the coarse, clean family towel. Presently she came, thimble and needle-case in hand, and established herself on one of the yellow wooden chairs, to make button-holes in the dingy calico; and, with the delicate stitches in those button-boles, she worked an entrance-way into her mother-in-law's heart.