Aunt Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between her lips, while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight.
“Well, my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore low-necked dresses all day long and all the year round.”
No one listened. My cousin Kate, who always imitated Aunt Sabina, was pinching my arm in an agony of mirth. “Look at them scuttling! The parlours must be full of smoke. Oh, but this one is still funnier; the one with the tall feather in her hair! Granny, did you wear feathers in your hair in the daytime? Oh, don’t ask me to believe it! And the one with the diamond necklace! And all the gentlemen in white ties! Did Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon?” Nothing was sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmamma’s mild frown of reproval.
“Well, they do in Paris, to this day, at weddings—wear evening clothes and white ties,” said Sillerton Jackson with authority. “When Minnie Transome of Charleston was married at the Madeleine to the Duc de....”
But no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. One of the party had abruptly exclaimed: “Oh, there’s a lady running out of the hotel who’s not in evening dress!”
The exclamation caused all our eyes to turn toward the person indicated, who had just reached the threshold; and someone added, in an odd voice: “Why, her figure looks like Lizzie Hazeldean’s—”
A dead silence followed. The lady who was not in evening dress paused. Standing on the door-step with lifted veil, she faced our window. Her dress was dark and plain—almost conspicuously plain—and in less time than it takes to tell she had put her hand to her closely-patterned veil and pulled it down over her face. But my young eyes were keen and farsighted; and in that hardly perceptible interval I had seen a vision. Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart? I felt the shock of a small pale oval, dark eyebrows curved with one sure stroke, lips made for warmth, and now drawn up in a grimace of terror; and it seemed as if the mysterious something, rich, secret and insistent, that broods and murmurs behind a boy’s conscious thoughts, had suddenly peered out at me.... As the dart reached me her veil dropped.
“But it is Lizzie Hazeldean!” Aunt Sabina gasped. She had stopped laughing, and her crumpled handkerchief fell to the carpet.
“Lizzie—Lizzie?” The name was echoed over my head with varying intonations of reprobation, dismay and half-veiled malice.
Lizzie Hazeldean? Running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year’s day with all those dressed-up women? But what on earth could she have been doing there? No; nonsense! It was impossible....