"Behind the beans! What an extraordinary place for a mother to be! What was she doing there?"
"Wait until you read it, my dear. You will like the book; people of good sense always do."
"Thank you. But, Louise dear, do you think it a wise thing to try? Remember what a disastrous failure I made on Sabbath. I don't believe I am fitted for aggressive movements."
"I don't believe anybody but Christ knows yet whether your Sabbath effort was all a failure, Lewis; and I don't believe that you and I have any right with the results, if we did what we could. Besides, this is different. I know you can read. Come."
"I can't see to read from the light of a tallow candle; I always despised them."
"We will take the lamp," she said, with a defiant little nod of her head toward the pretty bronze figure that held a shapely kerosene lamp of newest pattern and improved burner, Lewis having searched the lamp-stores over for just the right sort of offering for his bride. "We will set it right beside mother, where it will throw just the right angle of light on her work, and yet be shaded from her eyes; and we will not hint, by word or glance, that she may possibly see better than she does by her candle. Come, Lewis, carry it; it is too heavy for me. I will bring the book and my work-basket."
"Mother despises dressing-gowns," her husband said, rising slowly, and casting regretful looks at Shakespeare, the open fire, and his lounging-chair, though it was neither the chair nor yet the book that held him, but a horrible shrinking from this attempt at innovation, and an almost certainty of disastrous failure.
"No, she doesn't; she only thinks so, because she isn't used to them, and doesn't realize how much they save coats. I'm going to make John one for Christmas, and a pair of slippers like those Estelle gave you last year, and she will like them very much; you see if she doesn't. Now we're ready."