We both worked diligently and
silently for awhile, and then old Hannah, pausing with a half cleaned
potatoe in one hand and a knife dripping with water in the other,
looked at me seriously for a moment and said half meditatively:
"Well now; arn't you the baby, Miss Amelia, to spend your time over
that foolish stuff; fitter for you be knitting a little garter, or
hemming a little handkerchief for yourself."
I smiled, and without raising my eyes from the critical curve of my
paper lady's bustle, which I was then rounding most carefully, I
answered:
"I suppose I might do better with my time, Hannah, if I knew how, but
as I don't, I'd rather be doing this than nothing."
"It says a lot for Miss Forty, then," Hannah put in indignantly, "to
think you're goin' into your teens before long and that's all you know
how to do!"
"Miss de Fortier did not come to teach me sewing and knitting, Hannah.
She taught me lessons."
"Lessons how are you! And what's become of them if she did? Oh, its a
fine way children are brought up in this country," the old woman went
on half in soliloquy; "a bit of this and a bit of that and not much of
either. I pity the housekeepers ye'll make yet. God help the poor men
that are waiting for ye. Many's the missing button and broken sock
they'll have to put up with!"
"Well, Hannah," I interrupted, beginning an impromptu justification
and defence--but Hannah was destined never to have her conviction
shaken, for just then I heard a sharp rapping at the library window,
and gathering up the fragments of my fashion-plate in my linen
pinafore, I ran outside and looked towards that end of the house.
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