“No matter,” said Mrs. Farrell, “the mood is past, now; but you’d better pull a few of them, because one mustn’t come for ferns without getting them.”
She put together in pretty clusters the ferns with which he heaped her lap, holding them up from time to time and viewing them critically to get the effect, and talked as she worked, while he reclined on a sloping rock near by. “Isn’t that rather nice?” she asked, displaying the finest group, and letting the tips of the ferns drip through her fingers as she softly caressed their spray. “I suppose you’ll laugh if I tell you what my great passion in life would be, if I could indulge a great passion—millinery! Bonnets, caps, hats, ribbons, feathers!” Nothing so enraptures a man as to hear the woman of his untold love belittle herself; it intoxicates him that this adorable preciousness can hold itself cheap—as Mrs. Farrell possibly knew. “You know,” she went on, “I think I have some little artistic talent—not really enough for painting, but quite enough for clothes. I might set up a studio, and everybody would smile on my efforts, but if I set up a shop, nobody would associate with me. You wouldn’t, yourself! Don’t pretend to be so much better than other people,” cried Mrs. Farrell, with nothing of the convent left in her look.
“I don’t know about being better,” said Easton. “But I’ve lived too little in the world to be quite of it, I suppose. I’m afraid I am not shocked at the notion of anybody’s being a milliner that likes.”
“Oh yes, I know. Cheap ideas of equality. But you wouldn’t marry a milliner, if she was ever such a genius in her art.”
“If I were in love with her, and she were in love with me and would have me, I would marry her. But why do you make marrying the test of a man’s respect for a woman?”
“Isn’t it?”
Easton pondered awhile. “Well, yes, it does seem to be,” he said, a little sadly. “But it narrows the destiny of half the world.”
“Are you woman’s rights?” asked Mrs. Farrell, trailing a plume of fern through the air.
“Oh, I’m woman’s anything,” said Easton; “anything that women really want; but rights are a subject that they don’t seem very certain of, themselves.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Farrell, “that’s the trouble with women; from day to day, and from dress to dress, they don’t really know what they want. There’s Rachel Woodward; she has this decided talent, but she don’t seem to want decidedly to use it, as a man would. I’m not even sure that if all the world were propitious I should open a milliner shop. But I think I should. If I ever do, Mr. Easton, and you marry one of my ’prentices, I want you to promise that you’ll let her buy her bonnets of me. That isn’t asking a great deal, is it?” She was scrutinizing a crest of maidenhair and making it tilt on its stem, as if in doubt just where to put it in the cluster, and she began softly and as if unconsciously, to whistle in a low, delicious note. Then she suddenly stopped, made a little prim mouth, threw up her eyebrows, and said: “Why, excuse me, excuse me! What awful behavior in company!”