Page:Minnie's Bishop and Other Stories (1915).djvu/69

 guess in December what fabrics American women will want to buy in May.

Some day Miss Honoria will do this work—will, I feel tolerably certain, be at the very head of the elect corps of those who do it; will guess more brilliantly than the others; will buy with more infallible certainty that what she buys will be sold again.

Here I am left wondering! If Onnie Dever had remained at home she would, in the ordinary course of time, have married. In some tiny windswept cabin on an island she would have ministered to the wants of a man who returned to her day after day, wet and weary from toiling on the sea. She herself would have toiled, sometimes standing knee-deep in water beside a stranded boat while the creel on her back was filled with turf.

She would have staggered under her burden up the stony beach time after time, until the autumn darkness closed round her, and built her stack of fuel against the coming of the winter days. She would have baked great brown-crusted loaves in pot ovens. She would have dragged scanty milk from the udders of lean cows. She would have cleaned and salted the fish her husband caught and hung them in the reek of the fire's smoke to dry. She would have patched shirts and trousers painfully until patch was joined to patch and the original fabric was no more than a memory. She would have gone barefooted, with splayed, misshapen feet,