“I don’t see when you’re ever goin’ to use ’em.”

“Mebbe there’d be chances enough to use ’em if some folks was as crazy to take up with ’em as some other folks,” returned Sarah Barnard.

“I’d like to know what you mean?”

“Oh, nothin’.  If folks want chances to make pillow-slips bad enough there’s generally poor tools enough layin’ ’round, that’s all.”

“I’d like to know what you mean, Sarah Barnard.”

“Oh, I don’t mean nothin’,” answered Sarah Barnard.  She glanced at her daughter Charlotte and smiled slyly, but Charlotte never returned the glance and smile.  She sewed steadily.  Rose colored, but she said nothing.  She looked very pretty and happy, as she sat there, sewing knitted lace on her wedding-pillows; and she really was happy.  Her passionate heart had really satisfied itself with the boyish lover whom she would have despised except for lack of a better.  She was and would be happy enough; it was only a question of deterioration of character, and the nobility of applying to the need of love the rules of ordinary hunger and thirst, and eating contentedly the crust when one could not get the pie, of drinking the water when one could not get the wine.  Contentment may be sometimes a degradation; but she was happier than she had ever been in her life, although she had a little sense of humiliation when she reflected that Tommy Ray, younger than herself, tending store under her brother, was not exactly a brilliant match for her, and that everybody in the village would think so.  So she colored angrily when her aunt Sarah spoke as she did, although she said nothing.  But her mother, although she had rebelled in private bitterly against her daughter’s choice, was ready enough to take up the cudgels for her in public.

“Well,” said Hannah Berry, “two old maids in the family is about enough, accordin’ to my way of thinkin’.”

“It’s better to be an old maid than to marry somebody you don’t want, jest for the sake of bein’ married,” retorted Sarah Barnard, fiercely.

The two sisters clashed like two thorny bushes of one family in a gale the whole afternoon.  The two daughters sewed silently, and Sylvia knitted a stocking with scarcely a word until she arose to get tea.

Cephas and Silas both came to tea, which was served in state, with a fine linen table-cloth, and Sylvia’s mother’s green and white sprigged china.  Nobody suspected, as they tasted the damson sauce with the thin silver spoons, as they tilted the green and white teacups to their lips, and ate the rich pound-cake and pie, what a very feast of renunciation and tragedy this was to poor Sylvia Crane.  Cephas and Silas, indeed, knew that money had been advanced her by the town upon her estate, but they were far from suspecting, and, indeed, were unwilling to suspect, how nearly it was exhausted and the property lived out.  It was only a meagre estimate that the town of Pembroke had made of the Crane ancestral acres.  If Silas and Cephas had ever known what it was, they had dismissed it from their minds, they were interested in not knowing.  Suppose their wives should want to give her a home and support.