Mrs. Dud's Sister

They were having tea on the terrace. As Varian strolled up to the group he wished that Hunter could see the picture they made—Hunter, who had not been in America for thirty years, and who had been so honestly surprised when Varian had spoken of Mrs. Dud's pretty maids—she always had pretty ones, even to the cook's third assistant.
“Maids? Maids? It used to be 'help,'” he had protested. “You don't mean to say they have waitresses in Binghamville now?”
Varian had despaired of giving him any idea.
“Come over and see Mrs. Dud,” he had urged, “and do her portrait. We've moved on since you left us, you know. She's a wonder—she really is. When you remember how she used to carry her father's dinner to the store Saturday afternoons—”
“And now I suppose she sports real Mechlin on her cap,” assented Hunter, anxious to show how perfectly he caught the situation.
Varian had roared helplessly. “Cap? Cap!” he had moaned finally. “Oh, my sainted granny! Cap! My poor fellow, your view of Binghamville must be like the old maps of Africa in the green geography, that said 'desert' and 'interior' and 'savage tribes' from time to time. I should like awfully to see Mrs. Dud in a cap.”
Hunter had looked puzzled.
“But, dear me! she might very well wear one, I should think,” he had murmured defensively. “I don't wish to be invidious, but surely Lizzie must be—let's see; 'eighty, 'ninety—why, she must be between forty-five and fifty now.”
Varian had waved his hand dramatically. “Nobody considers Mrs. Dud and time in the same breath. If you could see her in her golf rig! Or on a horse! She even sheds a lustre on the rest of us. I forget my rheumatism!”
But Hunter, retreating behind his determination to avoid a second seasickness—it might have been sincere; nobody ever knew—had stayed in Florence, and Varian had been obliged to come without him to the house-party.
On a straw cushion, a cup in her strong white hand, a bunch of adoring young girls at her feet, sat Mrs. Dud. Rosy and firm-cheeked, crisp in stiff white duck, deliriously contrasted with her fluffy Parisian parasol, she scorned the softening ruffles of her presumable contemporaries; her delicately squared chin, for the most part held high, showed a straight white collar under a throat only a little fuller than the girlish ones all around her.