noon
They had had a quilting at the house of the two sisters that day . Six or seven women of the neighborhood , of middle age or older , had been in to sew on the glaring , varicolored square . All day long they had thrust their needles up and down and gossiped in their slow , insinuating way , pausing only at noon to move their chairs to the dinner-table , where they sat with the same set curves to their backs . The sun had gone down behind the mountain and the workers had departed , some traversing the fields and others disappearing by invisible paths in the near-by wood . The two sisters had taken the finished quilt from its wooden frame , and were carefully ironing out the wrinkles preparatory to adding it to the useless stack of its kind in the corner of the room . `` I believe , as I 'm alive , that it 's the purtiest one yet , '' remarked Mrs. Slogan .