By this time, Linda was laughing outright.
“Oh, you are so funny, Fred! But you only just ought to see Kate Graham’s crazy quilt. I know you couldn’t help calling it lovely. She has got pieces of ever so many wedding dresses in it; but I don’t know who would give me any. Aunt Mary never will get married, nor Cousin Susie, nor our Bridget, unless Pat hurries up with his courting—and there’s nobody else. Besides, they are all making
crazy quilts of their own. I would start one with papa’s old silk handkerchief and his Association badge, if I thought I could ever get pieces enough to finish it; but I don’t see how I could.”
“Bess Hartley told me that she was going to send off somewhere and get a lot of pieces that are put up to sell. You get a whole package of assorted colors for a dollar,” suggested Fred.
“Oh, that would make it cost too much! Mamma would not let me do that,” said Linda, shaking her head. “She says it is well enough to use up odd bits of silk in that way, if one happens to have them; but she doesn’t think it right to spend money in such a manner, instead of using it for better purposes—and I don’t suppose it is.”
“Well, I am sure I don’t know what you are going to do,” was Fred’s consoling observation. “You’d be as crazy as the rest of the girls if you began to piece a quilt; and I don’t know but you will go crazy if you can’t.”
With which conclusion, Fred walked off whistling, and left Linda to read her Cousin Dell’s letter over again, and wish that Patrick O’Brien would propose to Bridget, if he was ever going to, so that she could get married, and have a new silk dress for her wedding.
However, Linda was not the girl to fret and worry after things which were unattainable.
Fred would have his joke, but she was not going to make herself unhappy just because she had not the materials for making silk patchwork, as Dell and the rest of her girl friends were doing. There were plenty of other pleasures and amusements within her reach, and the one that she enjoyed most of all came in her way, as it happened, the very next morning.
