inquired, with her
inconsequent titter. "I've had that in mind ever since I went to school.
I always thought if I was one of the board o' selectmen, I guess I could
manage to fill up that hole."

"I guess I shall have to set down here and shake the gravel out o' my
shoe," said Sophronia. "You have this nice flat place, and I'll set
where I can get my foot up easy."

There was the softest accompanying rustle, and they had both sat down.
Mariana, over the wall, gripped her basket with a tenser hand, as if the
dishes, of their own accord, might clink. She held her breath, too,
smiling because she knew the need of caution would be brief. The instant
they were settled, she told herself, they would talk down any such
trifling sound as an unconsidered breath. She could foretell exactly
what they would say, once they had exhausted the topic of gravel in the
shoe. It would be either the new church cushions, or mock mince-pies for
the sociable, or the minister's daughter's old canary that had ceased
to sing or to echo the chirping of others, and yet was regarded with a
devotion the parishioners could not indorse. Mariana had seen both her
friends that day, and each of them had been more keenly alive to these
topics than any.

"I don't see what makes you so sure," said Sophronia, in a jerky
fashion, accompanying the attempt to draw her foot into the position
indicated for unlacing.

"Because I am," said Lizzie Ann. "So you are, too. Mariana Blake
never'll marry in the world. She ain't that kind."

"I don't know why she ain't," said her friend, in an argumentative tone
of the sort adopted to carry on brilliantly a conversation of which both
participants know the familiar moves. "Mariana's a real pretty woman,
prettier by far than she was when she's a girl. I know she's gettin'
along. She was forty-three last April, but age ain't everything. Look at
aunt Grinnell. She married when she's fifty-three, and she was homely 's
a hedge fence and hadn't any faculty. Nor she didn't bring him a cent,
either."

"Well, nobody'd say Mariana was homely. But she won't marry. Nor she
wouldn't if she was eighteen. She ain't that kind."

"There, I've got it laced up," said Sophronia. She seemed to settle into
an easier attitude, and Mariana could hear the scratch of the heel as
she thrust the rehabilitated foot afar from her on the lichened rock.
"Well, I guess you're right, but I don't know why it's so, after all. If
I was a man, seems if