And then had followed a morning such as she had never dreamed of. The excitement of driving to the station in the exhilarating morning air, past houses which, like her uncle’s, seemed the abodes of luxurious ease. Before many of them carriages were waiting, and through the open doors she caught glimpses of white-capped servants and coloured nurses carrying babies in long robes of lawn and lace. A vision of Polly in her pink checked gingham flashed before her. How could life be so different?
The ride in the cars was delightful, past a succession of elegant houses and beautifully laid out grounds, until she began to feel she had reached a new world where care was an unknown quantity.
Then the city, with its delightful whirl of cars and horses and people. She had never imagined there could be so many in any one place before. She marvelled at the condescension of the gentlemen in the handsomely appointed shoe store, and blushed as one of them placed her foot on the rest. She looked in amazement at the elegantly furnished apartments of Madame Louise, and the wonderful structures of feathers and lace and ribbon, which the voluble saleswoman assured them were cheap at thirty dollars, and was lost in a rapturous delight, as, with the calmness of experienced shoppers, her cousins went from one department to another in White’s and Hovey’s, laying in a supply of airy nothings of which she did not even know the use; always being treated by them with the same delicate consideration: there was nothing forced upon her, only, as they were getting things, she might as well be fitted too. Then to Huyler’s for ices and macaroons, then up past St Paul’s and the Common, and then home to a lunch of chicken salad and strawberries and frothed chocolate, in the cool dining-room, with its massive leather-covered chairs and potted plants and roses.
She was growing used now to the new order of things and smiled a welcome to Belle from the velvet lounging chair in which she, Pauline Harding, who had never lounged in her life, was beginning to feel perfectly at home.
‘What an inveterate bookworm you are, Paul,’ and Belle looked at the pile of volumes Pauline had brought from the library to study in the long morning hours which the force of a lifelong habit gave her, before the rest of the family were astir.
‘You forget I am an ignoramus,’ she answered quietly. ‘I must do something to catch up.’
Belle shrugged her shoulders.
‘What’s the use? It is surprising with what an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge one can get through this old world.’
‘Such a speech from a woman in this age is rank heresy!’
‘Oh, of course, if you are going in for equal suffrage and anti-opium, and the rest, but I never aspired to the garment of either Lucy Stone or Frances Willard. I do pine to be an anatomist, and Professor Herschel says I have a decided talent for it too. However, papa is not progressive, at least he does not want his daughters to be, although I tell him I might be a professor in Harvard some day, so there is nothing left for me but to fall into the ranks of the majority and do nothing.’