(for of course
it was Mrs. Lathrop) was matching scraps for a "crazy" sofa-pillow,
and there was something as touchingly characteristic in the calmness
and deliberation of her matching as there was in the wild whirl which
Susan's stocking received whenever that lady felt the moment had come
to alter her needles. For Susan, when she knit, knit fast and
furiously, whereas Mrs. Lathrop's main joy in relation to labor lay in
the sensation that she was preparing to undertake it. The sofa-pillow
had been conceived--some eighteen months before--as a crazy-quilt, but
all of us who have entertained such friends unawares know that the
size of their quilts depended wholly upon the wealth of our
scrap-bags, and in the case of Mrs. Lathrop's friends their silk and
satin resources had soon forced the reduction of her quilt into a
sofa-pillow, and indeed the poor lady had during the first weeks felt
a direful dread that the final result would be only a pin-cushion. She
had begun the task with the idea of keeping it for "pick-up" work, and
during the eighteen months since its beginning she had picked it up so
rarely that after a year and a half of "matching" it was not yet
matched. It goes without saying that Miss Clegg had very little
sympathy with her friend's fancy-work and despised the slowness of its
progress, but her contempt had no effect whatever upon Mrs. Lathrop,
whose friendship was of that quality the basis of which knows not the
sensation of being shaken.

So the older woman sat before the fire, and sometimes stared long upon
its glow, and sometimes thoughtfully drew two bits of silk from her
bag and disposed them side by side to the end that she might calmly
and dispassionately judge the advisability of joining them together
forever, while the younger woman knit madly away without an instant's
loss or a second's pause.

Mrs. Lathrop was thinking very seriously of pinning a green stripe to
a yellow polka-dotted weave which had once formed part of Mrs. Macy's
mother's christening-robe, when Susan opened her lips and addressed
her. The attack was so sudden that the proprietor of the crazy-work
started violently and dropped the piece of the christening-robe; but
the slight accident had no effect upon her friend.

"It does beat me, Mrs. Lathrop," she began, "how you can potter over
that quilt year in and year out. I sh'd think you'd be so dead-sick o'
the sight o' them pieces 't you'd be glad to dump the whole in the
fire