“Are you going to let us make another dress for the kiddies, Sallie, dear?” she finally was forced by her uneasiness to ask, though with the deepest sweetness and consideration in her voice.

If I am ever a widow with young children I hope they will burn us all up with the deceased rather than keep me wrapped in a cotton-wool of sympathy, as all of us do Sallie.

“It’s lovely of you, Nell, to want to do more for the babies after all the beautiful things you and Evelina have made them, and I may be able to get another white dress apiece for them after I give Cousin James the bills, that are awful already, but this is some ruffling that I just forced Mamie Hall to let me bring up to you girls to do for her baby.  The poor little dear is two months old and Mamie is just beginning on his little dress for him.  He has been wearing the plainest little slips.  Mamie says Ned remarked on the fact that the baby was hardly presentable when you girls stopped in with him to see it the other day, Nell.  I urged her to get right to work fixing him up.  It is wrong for children not to be kept as daintily as their father likes to see them.”

How any woman that is as spiritually-minded as I am, and who has so much love for the whole world in her heart, and such a deep purpose always to offer it to her fellowmen according to their need of it, can have the vile temper I possess I cannot see.

“And the sight that would please me better than anything else I have even thought up to want to see,” I found myself saying when I became conscious—­I hope I didn’t use any of the oaths of my forefathers which must have been tempting my refined foremothers for generations and which I secretly admire Henrietta for indulging in on occasions of impatience with Sallie—­“would be Ned Hall left entirely alone with that squirming baby, that looks exactly like him, when it is having a terrible spell of colic and Ned is in the midst of a sick headache, with all the other children cold, hungry, and cross, the cook gone to a funeral, and the nurse in a grouch because she couldn’t go and—­and he knowing that Mamie was attired in a lovely, cool muslin dress, sitting up here on the porch with us sipping a mint julep and smoking a ten-cent cigar, resting and getting up an appetite for supper.  I want him to have about five years of such days and then he would deserve the joys of parenthood that he now does not appreciate.”

“Oh, Mamie wouldn’t smoke a cigar!” was the exclamation that showed how much Sallie got of the motif of my eruption.

“Glorious!” exclaimed Nell, with shining eyes.

I must be careful about Nell, she is going this new gait too fast for one so young.  Women must learn to fletcherize freedom if it is not to give them indigestion of purpose.

“Still Ned provides everything in the world he can think of to help Mamie,” said Caroline, who had come up the walk just in time to fan the flame in me by her sweet wistfulness, with a soft judiciousness in her voice and eyes.  “And Mamie adores the children and him.”