"What's abstractly?" said Miss Anastasia scornfully.
"Where do you get hold of such hard words, Lucy?" said Mrs. Douglass.
"I don't know, Mis' Douglass;--they come to me;--it's practice, I suppose. I had no intention of being obscure."
"One kind o' word's as easy as another I suppose, when you're used to it, ain't it?" said the sewing-woman.
"What's abstractly?" said the mistress of the house again.
"Look in the dictionary, if you want to know," said her sister.
"I don't want to know--I only want you to tell."
"When do you get time for it, Lucy? ha'n't you nothing else to practise?" pursued Mrs. Douglass.
"Yes, Mis' Douglass; but then there are times for exertion, and other times less disposable; and when I feel thoughtful, or low, I commonly retire to my room and contemplate the stars or write a composition."
The sewing-woman greeted this speech with an unqualified ha! ha! and Fleda involuntarily raised her head to look at the last speaker; but there was nothing to be noticed about her, except that she was in rather nicer order than the rest of the Finn family.
"Did you get home safe last night?" inquired Miss Quackenboss, bending forward over the quilt to look down to Fleda.
Fleda thanked her, and replied that they had been overturned and had several ribs broken.
"And where have you been, Fleda, all this while?" said Mrs. Douglass.
Fleda told, upon which all the quilting-party raised their heads simultaneously to take another review of her.
"Your uncle's wife ain't a Frenchwoman, be she?" asked the sewing-woman.
Fleda said "oh no"--and Miss Quackenboss remarked that "she thought she wa'n't;" whereby Fleda perceived it had been a subject of discussion.
"She lives like one, don't she?" said aunt Syra.
Which imputation Fleda also refuted to the best of her power.
"Well, don't she have dinner in the middle of the afternoon?" pursued aunt Syra.
"And she can't eat without she has a fresh piece of roast meat on table every day, can she?"
"It is not always roast," said Fleda, half vexed and half laughing.
"I'd rather have a good dish o' bread and 'lasses than the hull on't;" observed old Mrs. Finn; from the corner where she sat manifestly turning up her nose at the far-off joints on Mrs. Rossitur's dinner-table.