She
had discovered that work is the best fun after all, and I learned
it in time, but have my lapses, and so had she.
I know what was her favourite costume when she was at the age that
they make heroines of: it was a pale blue with a pale blue bonnet,
the white ribbons of which tied aggravatingly beneath the chin, and
when questioned about this garb she never admitted that she looked
pretty in it, but she did say, with blushes too, that blue was her
colour, and then she might smile, as at some memory, and begin to
tell us about a man who - but it ended there with another smile
which was longer in departing. She never said, indeed she denied
strenuously, that she had led the men a dance, but again the smile
returned, and came between us and full belief. Yes, she had her
little vanities; when she got the Mizpah ring she did carry that
finger in such a way that the most reluctant must see. She was
very particular about her gloves, and hid her boots so that no
other should put them on, and then she forgot their hiding-place,
and had suspicions of the one who found them. A good way of
enraging her was to say that her last year's bonnet would do for
this year without alteration, or that it would defy the face of
clay to count the number of her shawls. In one of my books there
is a mother who is setting off with her son for the town to which
he had been called as minister, and she pauses on the threshold to
ask him anxiously if he thinks her bonnet 'sets' her.
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