Whereupon my father laughed as before, and answered:
"A voice, has she? Like an angel's, is it? What next, I wonder?"
My mother made most of my clothes. There was no need for her to do so, but in the absence of household duties I suppose it stimulated the tenderness which all mothers feel in covering the little limbs they love; and one day, having made a velvet frock for me, from a design in an old pattern book of coloured prints, which left the legs and neck and arms very bare, she said:
"Isn't our Mary a little lady? But she will always look like a lady, whatever she is dressed in."
And then my father laughed still more contemptuously and replied,
"Her grandmother weeded turnips in the fields though—ninepence a day dry days, and sixpence all weathers."
My mother was deeply religious, never allowing a day to pass without kneeling on her prayer-stool before the image of the Virgin, and one day I heard her tell my father that when I was a little mite, scarcely able to speak, she found me kneeling in my cot with my doll perched up before me, moving my lips as if saying my prayers and looking up at the ceiling with a rapt expression.
"But she has always had such big, beautiful, religious eyes, and I shouldn't wonder if she becomes a Nun some day!"
"A nun, eh? Maybe so. But I take no stock in the nun business anyway," said my father.
Whereupon my mother's lips moved as if she were saying "No, dearest," but her dear, sweet pride was crushed and she could go no farther.