ury would have thought that
she did not know her business, if she had not gone through this
preliminary process; and the farmers' wives and daughters treated it
all as a matter of course, replying with a good deal of independent
humour to the customer, who, once having discovered where good
butter and fresh eggs were to be sold, came time after time to
depreciate the articles she always ended in taking. There was
leisure for all this kind of work in those days.

Molly had tied a knot on her pink-spotted handkerchief for each of
the various purchases she had to make; dull but important articles
needed for the week's consumption at home; if she forgot any one of
them she knew she was sure of a good 'rating' from her mother. The
number of them made her pocket-handkerchief look like one of the
nine-tails of a 'cat;' but not a single thing was for herself, nor,
indeed, for any one individual of her numerous family. There was
neither much thought nor much money to spend for any but collective
wants in the Corney family.

It was different with Sylvia. She was going to choose her first
cloak, not to have an old one of her mother's, that had gone down
through two sisters, dyed for the fourth time (and Molly would have
been glad had even this chance been hers), but to buy a bran-new
duffle cloak all for herself, with not even an elder authority to
curb her as to price, only Molly to give her admiring counsel, and
as much sympathy as was consistent with a little patient envy of
Sylvia's happier circumstances. Every now and then they wandered off
from the one grand subject of thought, but Sylvia, with unconscious
art, soon brought the conversation round to the fresh consideration
of the respective merits of gray and scarlet. These girls were
walking bare-foot and carrying their shoes and stockings in their
hands during the first part of their way; but as they were drawing
near Monkshaven they stopped, and turned aside along a foot-path
that led from the main-road down to the banks of the Dee. There were
great stones in the river about here, round which the waters
gathered and eddied and formed deep pools. Molly sate down on the
grassy bank to wash her feet; but Sylvia, more active (or perhaps
lighter-hearted with the notion of the cloak in the distance),
placed her basket on a gravelly bit of shore, and, giving a long
spring, seated herself on a stone almost in the middle of the
stream. Then she began dipping her little rosy toe