Hetty looked at her with incredulous eyes.
"You're not in earnest, are you?" she said.
"I am. In dead earnest."
"But, Aunt Polly, gingerbread! Such a little thing as that! Who ever heard of a girl's doing such a thing?"
"All the better if they never did. A new trade has a double chance. As for the 'little,' great things often come from small beginnings. Fortunes have been made out of gingerbread before now, I'll be bound, or if not that, out of something no bigger. No, Hetty, depend upon it, if your gingerbread is best, folks will want it. And if your teaching or sewing is only second best, they won't. It's the law of human nature, and a very good law, too, though it cuts the wrong way sometimes, like all laws."
"Aunt Polly, you're a genius!" cried Hetty, warmed into sudden glow by this vigorous common sense. "I can make good gingerbread, and it's just as you say, neither of us know enough to teach well, and we are both poor hands at sewing, and we should have a much better chance if we tried to do what we can and not what we can't. Why shouldn't I make gingerbread? Dely'd help me, and if folks liked our things and bought them, we could live and keep together. We could make a kind of shop of this room, couldn't we? What do you think?"
"'Tisn't a bad place for such a trade," said Aunt Polly, slowly, measuring the room with her eyes. "Being on a corner is an advantage, you see; and there's that double winder on the street gives a first-rate chance to show what you've got to sell. I never did see no use in that winder before. My father, he had it cut for a kind of a whim like, and we all thought it was notional in him; but, as they say, keep a thing long enough and a use'll turn up. It's a sort of a gain for you, too, having the house so old-fashioned. Folks has a hankering for such things, nowadays—the Lord knows why. I hear 'em going on about it when I'm out tailorin', calling ugly things 'quaint,' and lovely, because they're old. Hetty,"—with sudden inspiration,—"here's an idea for you, be 'quaint'! Don't try for a shop, keep the room a room, and make it as old-fashioned-looking as you can, and I'll bet a cookie that your gingerbread'll be twice as popular with one set of folks, and if it's first-rate gingerbread, the other set who don't care for old things will like it just as well."
What a bracing thing is a word in season! Aunt Polly's little seed of suggestion grew and spread like Jack's fabled bean-stalk.
"Your light biscuits always turn out well," said Delia.
"And my snaps. Grandmother liked them so much. And you're a good hand at loaf bread, you know. Aunt Polly—I seem to smell a fortune in the air. We will begin at once, just as soon as I can get a half-barrel of flour and put an advertisement in the paper."