Page:To-morrow Morning (1927).pdf/56

 just copying the big boys. Kate, repainting the porch chairs on the lawn across the street, could hear the children, Charlotte sensibly bossing everybody, and Jodie's voice, happy and excited, piercing her heart.

She straightened up to smile at the two nuns coming around the house from the kitchen, where they had been to see Lizzie, and they smiled back shyly, their round pink faces, framed in stiff white pleats, like two pink-icing cakes in white-frilled paper cases. They moved as smoothly as if they were on roller skates, under the canopy of Miss Smith's white lilac bush that had pushed half through the Greens' fence and arched above the side path. Poor things! They must feel this tide of spring, as she and the wrens and Charlotte and Hoagland felt it, these waves that poured over the little town, breaking in foam of pear blossom and white lilac, and yet they must never answer. How could they look so contented?

Kate bowed sweetly to Doctor Wells, being driven past, and then pretended not to see Mrs. Martine, with her red cheeks and big puffed fawn-colored sleeves, a gtass-green veil floating from her sailor hat with the white ribbon, sitting up straighter than a steeple, in a yellow-wheeled runabout, driving a bob-tailed chest nut. She couldn't bear that woman; she simply couldn't bear her. But even Mrs. Martine couldn't bother her long to-day.

She felt so happy, almost like crying, or making little squeaks. She loved the smooth moss-green paint