"I'm most froze, traipsin' back and forth, I know that much," she muttered.
Eugene stood aside with a flourish and a graceful, beckoning wave of his hand.

"Won't you come in and warm yourself ?" he said, and he smiled in her face as if she and no other were the love of his heart.
But Margaret Bean had a shrewd understanding which no grace of flattery could dazzle, and felt truly that nowadays her principal claim to masculine admiration lay in her fine starching specialty of housewifery; and of that she gave no show, bundled up against the cold in her shapeless wools.

So she put aside the young man's smiling courtesy scornfully, as not belonging to her, and spoke in a voice as sharp as an edge of her own well-stiffened linens.

"No, sir," said Margaret Bean; "I've got bread in the oven and I can't stop, and I ain't coming in for two or three minutes and set with my things on, and get all chilled through when I go out.

I'll stand here while your sister reads that letter.