You are threatened with a relapse."
"No more," ordered Harriet with a forbidding hand, "and I repeat
what I said. Of course you know I never gossip, Anna; but when I
talk to you, I do not feel as though I were talking to anybody."
"Why, of course not," said Miss Anna, trying to make the most of
the compliment, "I am nobody at all, just a mere nonentity,
Harriet."
"Anna," said Harriet, after a pause of unusual length, "if it had
not been for my mother, I should have been married long ago.
Thousands of worse-looking women, and of actually worse women,
marry every year in this world and marry reasonably well. It was
because she tried to marry me off: that was the bottom of the
deviltry--the men saw through her."
"I am afraid they did," admitted Miss Anna, affably, looking down
into a hole.
"Of course I know I am not brilliant," conceded Harriet, "but then
I am never commonplace."
"I should like to catch any one saying such a thing."
"Even if I were, commonplace women always make the best wives: do
they not?"
"Oh, don't ask that question in this porch," exclaimed Miss Anna a
little resentfully. "What do I know about it!"
"My mother thinks I am a weak woman," continued Harriet, musingly.
"If my day ever comes, she will know that I am, strong, Anna,
_strong_."
"Ah, now, you must forgive your mother," cried Miss Anna, having
reached a familiar turn in this familiar dialogue. "Whatever she
did, she did for the best.
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