Part 10 (1/2)
”Well, what _is_ it? He has top boots and a gold band round his hat. What for? I see a great many coachmen and footmen dressed up so or some other way. What is the use of it?”
”No use, that I know.”
”Then what is it for?”
”I suppose they think it looks well.”
”So it does. But how rich people must be, mother, when their servants can dress handsomer than we ever could. And their own dresses! Did you see the train of that lady's dress?”
”Yes.”
”Beautiful black silk, ever so much of it, sweeping over the sidewalk.
She did not even lift it up, as if she cared whether it went into the dirt or not.”
”I suppose she did not care,” said Mrs. Carpenter mechanically, like a person who is not giving much thought to her answers.
”Then she must be _very_ rich indeed. I suppose, mother, her train would make you a whole nice dress.”
”Hardly so much of it as that,” said Mrs. Carpenter.
”No, no; I mean the cost of it. Mother, I wonder if it is _right_, for that woman to trail so much silk on the ground, and you not to be able to get yourself one good dress?”
”It makes no difference in my finances, whether she trails it or not.”
”No, but it ought.”
”How should it?”
Rotha worked awhile at this problem in silence.
”Mother, if n.o.body used what he didn't want, don't you think there would be enough for the people who do want? You know what I mean?”
”I know what you mean. But how should the surplus get to the people who want it?”
”Why!--that's very simple.”
”Not so simple as you think.”
”Mother, that is the way people did in the second chapter of Acts, that we were reading yesterday. n.o.body said that anything he had was his own.”
”That was when everybody was full of the love of Christ. I grant you, Rotha, that makes things easy. My child, let us take care we act on that principle.”
”We have nothing to give,” said Rotha. ”Mother, how that girl was dressed too, that came out of that same carriage. Did you see her?”
”Hardly.”
”She was about as old as I am, I guess. Mother, she had a feather in her hat and a beautiful little m.u.f.f, and a silk frock too, though there was no train to it. Her silk was red--dark red,” Rotha added with a sigh.
Mrs. Carpenter had been struck and moved, as well as her daughter, by the appearance of the figures in question, though, as she said, she had scarce seen more than one of them. But her thoughts were in a different channel.