So she colored angrily when her aunt Sarah spoke as she did, although she said nothing.

But her mother, although she had rebelled in private bitterly against her daughter's choice, was ready enough to take up the cudgels for her in public.
"Well," said Hannah Berry, "two old maids in the family is about enough, accordin' to my way of thinkin'." "It's better to be an old maid than to marry somebody you don't want, jest for the sake of bein' married," retorted Sarah Barnard, fiercely.
The two sisters clashed like two thorny bushes of one family in a gale the whole afternoon.

The two daughters sewed silently, and Sylvia knitted a stocking with scarcely a word until she arose to get tea.
Cephas and Silas both came to tea, which was served in state, with a fine linen table-cloth, and Sylvia's mother's green and white sprigged china.

Nobody suspected, as they tasted the damson sauce with the thin silver spoons, as they tilted the green and white teacups to their lips, and ate the rich pound-cake and pie, what a very feast of renunciation and tragedy this was to poor Sylvia Crane.
Cephas and Silas, indeed, knew that money had been advanced her by the town upon her estate, but they were far from suspecting, and, indeed, were unwilling to suspect, how nearly it was exhausted and the property lived out.

It was only a meagre estimate that the town of Pembroke had made of the Crane ancestral acres.