"Did not Alice look lovely this afternoon?" said Edwin, stopping his reading for a moment. "I hope you and she are going to be great friends. I think it was very nice for her to come so soon to call on you. She spoke so sweetly of the baby, too."
Molly said nothing but gazed at the cobweb. She said nothing but she did some thinking:
"Molly Brown, what right have you, just because you are tired and Alice Fern came to call on you, looking very pretty and very beautifully dressed, and found you all frumpy and your living room looking like a pig sty, what right have you, I say, to sulk? Now you answer your husband and tell him Alice was pretty and don't tell him anything else." Accordingly, after giving herself the mental chastisement, Molly emitted a faint:
"Yes, very pretty!" But it was so faint and so far away that Edwin looked at her in alarm, and then it was that she could stand nothing more and broke down and shed a few tears.
"Why, Molly, my dearest girl, what is the matter?"
"Nothing, but I am tired and everything is so dirty. Look at the cobwebs! Look at the dust on the books! Look at me! I am an old frowsy, untidy frump."
"You! Why, honey, you are always lovely. As for dust--don't bother about that. Let me read you this wonderful little poem by Gertrude Hall. I clipped it years ago."
Professor Green saw that Molly was tired and unstrung and he well knew that nothing soothed her more than poetry. Of course, man-like, he had no idea that what he had said about Alice Fern's looking so sweet had been too much for her, as she had contrasted herself all the afternoon with her husband's immaculate cousin. Molly wiped away the foolish tears as Edwin read the poem.
It settles softly on your things, Impalpable, fine, light, dull, gray; The dingy dust-clout Betty brings, And, singing, brushes it away:
And it's a queen's robe, once so proud, And it's the moths fed in its fold, It's leaves, and roses, and the shroud, Wherein an ancient Saint was rolled.
And it is beauty's golden hair, And it is genius' wreath of bay, And it is lips once red and fair That kissed in some forgotten May."
"It is lovely, exquisite!" breathed Molly. "I don't feel nearly so bad about it as I did."
But she did wish that Alice Fern had not seen that black, black cobweb.