Sallie came
over just as soon as the other delegation had got home to take the twins
off her hands. Jane had gone upstairs to make more calculations on our
reconstruction, and I was trying to get a large deep breath.
"Evelina." she said, as she sank in a chair near me and fastened her
large, very young-in-soul, eyes on mine, "were you just joking Nell, or
did you mean it, when you said the other day that you thought it would
be cowardly of a woman not to show a man that she loved him, if he for
any reason was not willing to make the first advances to her?" Sallie is
perfectly lovely in the faint lavender and pink things that Jane made
her decide to get in one conversation, whereas while Nell and Caroline
and I had been looking up and bringing her surreptitious samples of all
colors from the store all summer.
"Well, I don't know that I exactly meant Nell to take it all to heart,"
I answered without the slightest suspicion of what was coming. "But I do
think, Sallie, it would be no more than honest, fearless, and within a
woman's own greater rights."
"Mr. Haley was saying the other evening that a woman's sweet dependence
was a man's most precious heritage," Sallie gently mused out on the
atmosphere that was beginning to be pretty highly charged.
"Doesn't a woman have to depend on her husband's tenderness and care all
of the time--time she is bearing a child, Sallie, even up to the
asafoetida spoon crisis?" I asked with my cheeks in a flame but
determined to stand my ground.
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