store; as best she could, she fashioned garments out of them for Paulie and herself. The child’s things “always looked as if they’d been chopped out with an axe, and stitched with a skewer,” a woman from the bay once told me; but she spoke in pity rather than derision.
And other women speak still of the dress that Eva used to wear when she came down into the settlement—which, after a while, she never did, unless she was obliged. It was a gown of lavender silk, and the bonnet was to match. But it was the style of bonnet that ladies had been used to wear twenty years before; and as for the dress, the silk of it was so rich it could have stood up of itself, but its delicate tint was all streaked and faded, and it had been made for a crinoline and fairly rioted about the emaciated figure of its wearer. They were the gown and bonnet that Eva had been married in. She wore these bitter remembrancers of her bridal because she had no other respectable covering; and she wore them as they were because she had not the smallest ability to refashion them.
No; what the cheese-money actually went into was—just an old stocking. Really, and without any undue play on words, the effect of misery on Joel was, to make him a miser.
Unclassed, exiled, isolated, and condemned to these circumstances of squalor, Eva had yet one great joy in life—her little girl, Pauline. The child—she had named her after her mother, that mother, whether living still or dead she did not know, who had disowned her—was sweet as a bit of white clover, happy as a sunbeam, and vigorous as a root of cocks-foot grass. Paulie seemed to thrive on
