"Pretty well! oh!, pretty well!" she answered, with the look of bland good-humour her face almost always wore "and glad to see you, dear. Take a chair."
Alice did so, quite aware that the other person in the room was _not_ glad to see her.
"And how goes the world with you, Miss Fortune?"
"Humph! it's a queer kind of world, I think," answered that lady, drily, sweeping some of the picked beans into her pan: "I get a'most sick of it, sometimes."
"Why, what's the matter?" said Alice, pleasantly; "may I ask? Has anything happened to trouble you?"
"Oh, no!" said the other, somewhat impatiently; "nothing that's any matter to anyone but myself; it's no use speaking about it."
"Ah! Fortune never would take the world easy," said the old woman, shaking her head from side to side; "never would; I never could get her to."
"Now, do hush, mother, will you!" said the daughter, turning round upon her with startling sharpness of look and tone; " 'take the world easy!' you always did; I am glad I ain't like you."
"I don't think it's a bad way, after all," said Alice; "what's the use of taking it hard, Miss Fortune?"
"The way one goes on!" said that lady, picking away at her beans very fast, and not answering Alice's question; "I'm tired of it; toil, toil, and drive, drive, from morning to night and what's the end of it all?"
"Not much," said Alice, gravely, "if our toiling looks no further than this world. When we go we shall carry nothing away with us. I should think it would be very wearisome to toil only for what we cannot keep, nor stay long to enjoy."
"It's a pity you warn't a minister, Miss Alice," said Miss Fortune, drily.
"Oh, no, Miss Fortune," said Alice, smiling, "the family would be overstocked. My father is one, and my brother will be another a third would be too much. You must be so good as to let me preach without taking orders."
"Well, I wish every minister was as good a one as you'd make," said Miss Fortune, her hard face giving way a little; "at any rate, nobody'd mind anything you'd say, Miss Alice."
"That would be unlucky, in one sense," said Alice; "but I believe I know what you mean. But, Miss Fortune, no one would dream the world went very hard with you. I don't know anybody, I think, lives in more independent comfort and plenty, and has things more to her mind. I never come to the house that I am not struck with the fine look of the farm, and all that belongs to it."