This morning Aunt Bettie came up my front steps before breakfast with a large basketful of things for my dinner, and I wondered what I would have collected to be served to those people by the time all my neighbours had made their prize contributions. It took Aunt Bettie and Jane a half-hour to unpack her things and set them in the refrigerator and on the pantry shelves. One was a plump fruit-cake that had been keeping company, in a tight box, with other equally rich cakes ever since the New Year. It was ripe, or smelt so. It made me feel very hungry.,
And, furthermore, I didn't like that next hour much, just as a sample of life, for instance. Aunt Bettie had got her joining-together humour well started, and there, before my face, she made a present of every nice man in Hillsboro to that lovely, distinguished, strange girl who could have slipped through a bucket hoop if she had tried hard. I had to sit there, listen to the presentations, watch her drink two delicious cups of tea full of sugar and cream, and consume without fear three of Jane's puffy cakes, while I crumbled mine in secret and set half the cup of tea out of sight behind a fern pot.,
"Molly dear," she said with her words literally falling over themselves, "Tom says you would give us some of your dinner left-overs to take for lunch in the car, for we are going to take a run down to Hedgeland to see some awfully fine cattle he has heard will be in the market there. I don't want to ask mother, in case she won't let me go; and his mother, if he asked her, will begin to talk about us. Tom said I was to come to you, and you would understand and arrange it all quickly. He sent his love and all sorts of other messages. Isn't he fond of a joke?" And we kissed and laughed and packed a basket, and kissed and laughed again for good-bye. I felt amused and happy for a few minutes—and also deserted. It's a very good thing for a woman's conceit to find out how many of her lovers are just make-believes. I may have needed Tom's deflection..
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