“You see!” cried Mally, with an air of superior wisdom and wide social experience. “Oh my! if I should tell you all I’ve heard about those Ingrahams, you’d be surprised. One night they have a prayer-meeting and the next night a dance. It’s all right, I suppose. Kind of new, that’s all.”
On the following evening, when the luxurious Ingraham carriage was driven up before Mrs. Wilson’s poor little house, many eyes peered narrowly from neighbours’ windows to catch the unwonted sight; and Anna, slipping hastily out of the Wilson door, felt an access of humility in this exaltation of herself, for such she knew it seemed to her neighbours, transient though it was. She had suffered a guilty and apologetic consciousness all day toward Mally, who had treated her with a slight coolness and indifference, which afflicted Anna keenly.
When Anna entered the hall of the Ingraham house, a small, stout woman, in a brown dress and smooth hair, came out to greet her, and took her hand between both her own, which were white and soft and heavily weighted with diamonds. Anna found the diamonds confusing, but she knew the hands were kind. Mrs. Ingraham’s manner, of sincere kindliness and dignity, put Anna wholly at her ease, and she looked about her, presently, at the subdued luxury and elegance of her surroundings with a frank, childlike pleasure. Her absolute unconsciousness of herself saved Anna from the awkwardness which her unusual height, her angular thinness, and her unaccustomedness to social contact might otherwise have produced. She wore her “other dress,” which was of plain black poplin, but quite new, and not ungraceful in its straight untortured lines; and as she entered the great drawing-room, with its splendours of costly art, and met the eyes of many people who were watching her entrance, the quiet gravity and simplicity of her bearing were hardly less than grace.
Two women, dressed with elegance and apparently not deeply touched with religiousness, commented apart a little later, having met and spoken in turn with the lady from Boston and the young missionary elect.
“What do you think of Mrs. Ingraham’s new saints?” asked one, whose black dress was heavily studded with jet ornaments.
“I like the young missionary better than the Bostonian, myself,” was the reply. The speaker had red hair and an exquisite figure. “Isn’t she curious, though?” she continued. “Manners, you know, but absolutely no manner! I never encountered a woman before, even at her age, who positively had none.”
“That is what ails her, isn’t it?” returned her beaded friend. “You’ve just hit it. And you can see that tremendously developed missionary conscience of hers in every line of her face and figure, don’t you know you can?”
“Figure, my dear? She has none. I never saw such an utter absence of the superfluous!”
Here they both laughed clandestinely behind their laced handkerchiefs.
“Do you know how I should describe that girl?” challenged the Titian beauty, recovering.