“You’re so much cleverer than me with the needle. I was having it made for—for—” Mary Ann could not trust her voice to tell what she had been having it made for—“for an occasion. It won’t be needed now as soon as I expected, but you know, Selina’n’Jane, you always say yourselves there’s nothing like taking time by the forelock.”
“Mary Ann——”
“A few hours would finish it up if we all got at it. Oh, there’s Ma coughing. I must run and get the pail of water and hot brick to steam up the room.”
She threw the dress into her sister’s hands and was gone. They stood looking at each other across it.
“Poor Mary Ann!”
“She talked about an occasion. I don’t know more’n one kind of occasion people get dresses like this for. Can she mean——?”
“At her age? Nonsense!”
“Dr. Corbett appears to think a pile of her. He’s a widower——”
“Now you speak of it, Selina, he does look at her in an admiring sort of way. If there was anything of that kind in prospect—and of course she’d lay off black sooner——”