"I'll let you into the secret," she said. "I wanted to be smart to-day, and so I took one of my treasures. You'll never guess where this gold belt came from, Mr. Baskerville?"
"Don't like it, anyway," he answered.
"Why, 'twas the hat-band round my grandfather's hat! He was a beadle up to some place nigh London; and 'twas an heirloom when he died; and mother gived it to me, and here it is."
He regarded the relic curiously.
"A funny world, to be sure," he said. "Little did that bygone man think of such a thing when he put his braided hat on his head, I'll warrant."
He relapsed into a long silence, and Cora's remarks were rewarded with no more than nods of affirmation or negation. Then, suddenly, he broke out on the subject of apparel long after she thought that he had forgotten it.
"Terrible tearing fine I suppose you think your clothes are, young woman—terrible tearing fine; but I hate 'em, and they ill become a poor man's wife and a poor man's daughter. My mother wore her hair frapped back light and plain, with a forehead cloth, and a little blue baize rochet over her breast, and a blue apron and short gown and hob-nailed shoon; and she looked ten thousand times finer than ever you looked in your life—or ever can in that piebald flimsy, with those Godless smashed birds on your head. What care you for nature to put a bit of a dead creature 'pon top of your hair? A nasty fashion, and I'm sorry you follow it."
She kept her temper well under this terrific onslaught.
"We must follow the fashion, Mr. Baskerville. But I'll not wear this hat again afore you, since you don't like it."
"Going to be married and live up to your knees in clover, eh? So you both think. Now tell me what you feel like to my son, please."