How small and tight the bodice looked, how skimpy even the plaits of the
skirt for the present modes ... yet it had been a good linen in its day,
there was no doubt of that, this frock that had been stitched for her
mother's wedding gown.
For perhaps he had always been coming back to marry her, perhaps only
their young blood and eager hearts beating so strongly within them had
made the beat of wedding bells seem at first too slight a sound to catch
their absorbed attention.... So Loveday the elder had always known,
in spite of the sneers of the neighbours. So Loveday the younger had
maintained to carping girl-critics, though in her inmost heart she had
never been able to feel it mattered so vastly, for half the girls she
knew would have been in her predicament had their fathers been cut
off untimely. She knew it was not that she was born out of wedlock,
a misfortune that might happen to anyone, which oppressed her youth,
but the fact of her father having been a foreigner, and of that she
was fiercely resolved to be proud. Neither mother nor father had she
ever known, but the instinct of generous youth is ever to defend the
oppressed, and with her defence had love sprung in Loveday's heart.
Therefore, even with her sensation of disappointment at the sight of the
yellowed linen, there was reverence and tenderness in her touch as she
laid the gown across her narrow bed.
She ripped off the coarse blue wrapper that enfolded her, and stood
revealed in her little flannel under-bodice and linsey-woolsey petticoat
of striped red and black, her thin girlish arms and young bosom making
her look more childish than she did when fully clothed.
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