where one looked closely were proofs of repeated repair and care for cheap, outworn things.
Fidelia's eyes filled. She put down her packages and one of her hands sought David's. As he felt her clasp, he hardened his hand within hers to oppose her pity for his people.
"They don't care whether they have things or not," he whispered almost fiercely in his pride.
He heard his mother's voice and, in the blue gingham dress in which she did her cooking, she came from the kitchen. "David!" she cried; and then she looked on the beautiful, vivid girl who had come with him.
What Fidelia saw was a woman not beautiful at all and who never had been beautiful. She had wonderful eyes, large and gray, of the grayness which is warm and friendly and patient. Her eyes were set rather far apart in her thin, plain face. Her body was very thin, even more so than Fidelia had expected from that dress which she had exhibited to the salespeople at Field's. But thin as she was, she was not flat-bosomed; she was motherly, in spite of her thinness. She had brown, abundant hair, nearly half gray; her hands, besides being very thin, were calloused and wrinkled. But her eyes and her lips showed she was not old. As a matter of fact, she was barely forty-three; for she had married when she was twenty and David had been born within the year.
Fidelia did not feel that she was old; she was younger than Fidelia had expected her to be but she had worn herself so much more! Fidelia thought of her washing and polishing and mending over and over the poor, cheap possessions of this house; Fidelia
