“Well, now, what will those papers say next? Do you know what I read out of our own Advertiser the other day? That every woman over thirty has had at least one offer of marriage. Now, that’s a lie, for I never had an offer in my life. I’m kind of glad I didn’t, Ma, for I suppose I’d have took it; and you and me do have an awfully good time together, don’t we?”
But her mother was not listening now; it had been a flash merely of the old self. Mary Ann looked around the room until she found Jane’s lap-board with a pile of black sewing on it. She gathered up the carefully pressed pieces and poked them roughly in between a large clothes cupboard and the wall.
“There!” she said to herself, “it will be a while before they find that, and when they do they can call it Mary Ann’s flighty way of redding up a room.”
She heard her sisters whispering in the hall and went out to them. Selina was tying her bonnet-strings.
“I’m going home to do a lot of cooking,” she said in an important undertone. “John’s wrote to Ma’s relatives in Iowa, and some of them’s sure to come.”
Mary Ann looked into the wrinkled face; the past weeks had added new lines of genuine grief to it, yet she could not help seeing that Selina found some strange pleasure in all these incidents of a last illness. The words she had meant to say seemed futile. She was turning to go into her mother’s room again when an idea came to her.
“Don’t go yet,” she said. “I want to show you two something.”
She went into her bedroom and returned in a few minutes with the crimson dress over her arm.
“I was getting it fitted when the news of Ma’s sickness came, and I just put a waterproof over it. The seams have got a little ravelled. I thought maybe you two would help me top-sew them.”
“Mary Ann——!”