April 20th,2010 by Ann
The girl Hannah was seventeen, and she had made almost all that array of cakes and pastries on the kitchen dresser. She stood looking at them, her healthy pink ft glowing with pride. She wore a blue dress and a white apron, and her hair waved do her back to her waist in a golden-brown shower.
The party should be a lovely one. All the girls from her Sunday-school cl. were coming and four of the best-behaved boys as well. Then there was to be young man, Thomas Henry Smithson, the one that all the girls secretly laughed really, he was too conscientious, too iumberingly polite for anything. His hats seen always small, his trousers tight: his boots big. But her mother liked him. He helped make things go, sang a few songs in a voice he called baritone, and never lost temper.
Hannah felt that she could put up with anything so long as Ralph Wellings tuned up. He was nineteen. A strange boy for the little, fat, jolly parson to have as his s Hannah had heard that he was wild, but he had never seemed wild to her. Something they had met in the twilight, and he had walked along by her side through Penny! Woods to Hoyle's farm and carried the dozen eggs that she had gone to fetch back v him in a sugar-bag.
Of course, you were supposed to be still a child at seventeen, but Hannah didn’t feel exactly like a child. She could talk to Ralph Wellings about the things she knew — the proper way to make candied toffee, the books she had recently found in the attic, old books in which all the letter eases were eft's1, the nicest hymn tunes. He never laughed at her, and she found this refreshing.
She loved him very much, admiring his forehead, for some reason, most of all. It was high and white. His blue-black hair, parted at the side, waved as beautifully as did hers. "If we get married and have some children, they're sure to have curly hair," she thought. She liked, too. his flecked hazel eyes and his long fingers with their triangular nails. He called her "nice child", and always seemed glad to see her.
She took her entranced gaze from the cakes and went into the dairy. The house had once been a farm, and the cool, stone-shelved room was still called the dairy. One side of it was laden with food. There was a whole, crumb-browned ham on a dish by the side of a meat-plate on which stood a perfectly cooked sirloin of beef. Another dish held four or five pounds of plump, cooked sausages. The trifles were ready, so were the stewed fruits for those who liked plainer sweets, and there was more cream. Hannah felt, than could possibly be used.
She ran out of the room, smiling with delight, to look for her mother.
"Are you getting ready, mother?" she called. "Yes.
Her mother stood, bare-armed, in front of the oval mirror, a worried look in her eyes, her mouth filled with steel hairpins. She had her skirt on, but her black satin bodice was flung over the curved bedrail.
"Aren't you washed, child?" She seemed to speak harshly because of the hair-pins. "The company' will be here before we know where we are. We shall have a rush, you'll see."
"Never mind, mother, everything looks lovely. I wish the party was beginning just now."
She ran out of the room and changed her dress in a perfect fury of speed. Her face was clean enough, her hands white. What was the use of washing over and over again? Now she was in the summer pink dress that made her look older than ever before. The skirt was flounced, and she jumped round ballooning it, running a comb through her hair at the same time.
"He'll like me, he'll like me, he will," she chanted. And she ran across to her mother's room and flung herself panting on the great bed.
"Hannah, Hannah, be a lady!" cried her mother, rebuking.
Hannah seemed to have been asleep for a long time. She woke slowly, feeling the grey light on her eyelids. Her hands, gnarled and shrunken, lay outside the blue-and-white coverlet. A shadowed white plait straggled over one shoulder, thinning to a thread-tied end as it reached her breast.
She moved a little, opened her eyes, and moistened her lips. The morning was sunny and still ill. .I feel warm. She does a little and went on thinking of the par her mother had given when she was seventeen. On that day Ralph Wellings had kiss he for the first time. Unknowingly she smiled. The pink dress with its flounces, still remembered that, too. How lovely ii had all been.
She looked up when the door opened and frowned a little, seeing an ugly, middle aged woman with a paper-backed book in her hand.
"Well, grandma," he woman said in a kind and cheerful voice, "I've been up few times, but you were asleep. George is just I.-OHM' lo the Post Office in the doctor car, so will you sign the pension form? Hr's in a hit of a hurry I'll help you up."
She put a soft wrap about the old woman's shoulders and supported her what she wrote. "H-a-n-n-a-h" she mouthed, then her attention WMS attracted by something else for a moment. She stared at the completed form and gave a fretful cry. "Oh, grandmother you've gone and done it again! We shall have no end of bother. You've signed Hanna Wellings, and your name's Smithson ? Smithson."
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