if he didn't take it all serious and think he did have 'em!"
The judge had been obliged to abandon all thoughts of a career. Years before he had been Newbern's justice of the peace, until a gang of political tricksters defeated the sovereign will of the people. And perhaps he would again have accepted political honours, but none had been offered him. Still, the family was prosperous. For in addition to the pension, Mrs. Penniman kept a neat card in one of the front windows promising "Plain and Fancy Dressmaking Done Here," and Winona now taught school.
Having adjusted the cushion, Winona paused before the cage of a parrot on a stand at the end of the porch. The bird sidled over to her on stiff legs, cocked upon her a leering, yellow eye and said in wheedling tones, "Pretty girl, pretty girl!" But then it harshly screeched, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" This laughter was discordant, cynical, derisive, as if the bird relished a tasteless jest.
Winona went to the hammock and resumed an open book. Its title was "Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him." She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper. Winona at twenty was old before she should have been. She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features. Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but she seemed to carry almost the years of her mother. She was an earnest girl, severe in thought, concerned about her culture, seeking to subdue a nature which she profoundly distrusted to an ideal she would have described as one of elegance and refinement. The dress she wore was one of her best—for an exemplary young man would call that evening, bringing his choice silver flute upon which he would play justly if not brilliantly to Winona's piano accompaniment—but it was dull of tint, one of her mother's plain, not fancy, creations. Still Winona felt it was daring, because the collar was low and sported a fichu of lace. This troubled her, even as she renewed the earnest effort to know Matthew Arnold. She doubtfully fingered at her throat a tiny chain that supported a tiny pendant. She slipped the thing under the neck of her waist. She feared that with her low neck—she thought of it as low—the bauble would be flashy.
Mrs. Penniman came from the kitchen and sat on the porch steps. She was much like Winona, except that certain professional touches of colour at waist, neck, and wrists made her appear, in spirit at least, the younger woman. There were times when Winona suffered herself to doubt her mother's seriousness; times when the woman appeared a slave to levity. She would laugh at things Winona considered no laughing matters, and her sympathy with her ailing husband had come to be callous and matter of fact, almost perfunctory. She longed, moreover, to do fancy dressmaking for her child; and there was the matter of the silk stockings. The Christmas before the too downright Dave Cowan, in a low spirit of banter, had gifted Winona with these. They were of tan silk, and Dave had challenged her to wear them for the good of her soul.
Winona had been quite unpleasantly shocked at Dave's indelicacy, but her mother had been frivolous throughout the affair. Her mother said, too, that she would like to wear silk stockings at all times. But Winona—she spoke of the gift as hose—put the sinister things away at the bottom of her third bureau drawer. Once, indeed, she had nearly nerved herself to a public appearance in them, knowing that perfectly good women often did this. That had been the day she was to read her paper on Early Greek Sculpture at the Entre Nous Club. She had put them on with her new tan pumps, but the effect had been too daring. She felt the ogling eyes. The stockings had gone back to the third bureau drawer—to the bottom—and never had her ankles flashed a silken challenge to a public that might misunderstand.
Yet—and this it was that was making Winona old before her time—always in her secret heart of hearts she did long abjectly to wear silk stockings—all manner of sinful silken trifles. Evil yearnings like this would sweep her. But she took them to be fruits of a natural depravity that good women must fight. Thus far she had triumphed.
Mrs. Penniman now wielded the palm-leaf fan. She eyed her husband with an almost hardened glance, then ran a professional eye over the lines of Winona. Her head moved with quick little birdlike turnings. Her dark hair was less orderly than Winona's, and—from her kitchen work—two spots of colour burned high on her cheeks.
"Your locket's slipped inside your waist," she said, not dreaming that Winona had in shame brought this about.
Winona, who would have been shamed again to explain this, withdrew the bauble. The fond mother now observed the book above which her daughter bent, twisting her neck to follow the title.
"Is it interesting?" she asked; and then: "The way to know a man—cook for him."
Her daughter winced, suffering a swift picture of her too-light mother, cooking for Mr. Arnold.
"I should think you'd pick out a good novel to read," went on her mother. "That last one I got from the library—it's about a beautiful woman that counted the world well lost for love."
Winona murmured indistinctly.
"She didn't—she didn't stop at anything," added the mother, brightly.
"Oh, Mother!"
"I don't care! The Reverend Mallett himself said that novels should be read for an understanding of life—ever novels with a wholesome sex interest. The very words he said!"
"Mother, Mother!" protested Winona with a quick glance at her father.
She doubted if any sex interest could be wholesome; and surely, with both sexes present, the less said about such things the better. To her relief the perilous topic was abandoned.
"I suppose you both heard the big news today."
Mrs. Penniman spoke ingenuously, but it was downright lying—no less. She supposed they had not heard the big news. She was certain they had not. Winona was attentive. Her mother's business of plain and fancy dressmaking did not a little to make the acoustics of Newbern superior. From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern's social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further. She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were. She affected to turn with reluctance from her budding acquaintanceship with Matthew Arnold.
"It's the twins," began her mother with a look of pleased horror. "You couldn't guess in all day what they've been up to."
"You may be sure Wilbur was the one to blame," put in Winona, quick to defend the one most responsive to her lessons in faith, morals, etiquette.
"Ought to be soundly trounced," declared the judge. "That's what I always say."
"This is the worst yet," continued Mrs. Penniman.
She liked the suspense she had created. With an unerring gift for oral narrative, she toyed with this. She must first tell how she got it.
"You know that georgette waist Mrs. Ed Seaver is having?"
"Have they done something awful?" Winona demanded. "I perfectly well know it wasn't Merle's fault."
"Well, Mrs. Seaver came in about four o'clock for her final fitting, and what do you think?"
"For mercy's sake!" pleaded Winona.
"And Ed Seaver had been to the barber shop to have his hair cut—he always gets it cut the fifteenth of each month—well, he found out all about it from Don Paley, that they'd had to send for to come to the Whipple New Place to cut it neatly off after the way it had been sawed off rough, and she told me word for word. Well, it's unbelievable, and every one saying something ought to be done about it—you just never would
