He laughed till the tears came into his eyes, and he fell to coughing, and then his mother appeared with the inevitable bottle of tolu, capsicum and paregoric, and compelled him, between his paroxysms of amusement and choking, to swallow an extra large dose.
When he told her the news, she laughed too, but a trifle grimly, and turned on Val with:
"I am surprised to hear that you discuss family affairs with the neighbors. It's not a Gano habit."
And she went back to her own room without vouchsafing the smallest defence or explanation. But Val's father took her in his lap, and told her a long consoling story, beginning, "In the year 18—" This communication, bristling, as usual, with dates, was to the effect that the "hidden hoard" was composed of worthless Confederate notes, and it was just because they had that trunk full of money that they were poor.
Nobody ever heard of a bill going unpaid or having to be presented twice at Mrs. Gano's door; but Val was very conscious as time went on that her "frocks," as her grandmother called dresses, were old and ugly and out of fashion. They had been lengthened, and turned, and dyed, and when they simply refused to hold together any longer, instead of getting a new one like Julia Otway's, as she had dreamed, Val had the humiliation year by year of wearing her way, moth-like, through her aunt Valeria's entire antiquated wardrobe. There were all kinds of objections to drawing on this family reserve. The things in themselves, to Val's eyes, were hideous, hideous—barèges unpleasant to the touch and sight, ugly reps, ancient bayadere silks and flowered organdies that tore if you looked at them hard; and the inhabitants of New Plymouth looked at them very hard indeed, and sometimes rubbed their eyes. Then, as if their being so out of fashion were not cross enough, these fabrics were fabulously precious to her grandmother's heart, and had to be worn, so to speak, with fasting and prayer. Woe to Val if she spilt milk, or dropped maple syrup, on Aunt Valeria's things, for these objectionable garments never to the bitter end became Val's own. The dead woman seemed to stretch a hand out of the grave to keep her hold on them, never for a moment remitting her claim. Spoiling your own pretty blue sash, that your mother had bought in New York, was naughty, but hurting anything of Aunt Valeria's was a crime of darker hue. Each time a new garment was required, Mrs. Gano, with set face and faltering hands, would open Aunt Valeria's trunk, and, with the air of one dealing out purple and fine linen, or like a monarch conferring orders of the Garter and the Cross, she would say to the dark-browed child:
"There! you shall have that!"
And Val would perforce disguise as well as she could her loathing of the gift.
The child's passionate hatred of the ugly and uncouth was an unending pain to her. She would shut her eyes tight as she passed old Mr. Thompson, with his great wen, conscious of the same sensation of sickness that would come over her at the malodorous neighborhood of a dead cat. She would jerk her head away in the street as if she had been struck when she met the idiot boy "Jake," more shaken and afraid than if she had seen a ghost. She would grit her teeth morning after morning with unabated rage and detestation as she put on a certain green poplin of Aunt Valeria's, with its pattern of yellow ochre palms. There was something about the sad and faded green of this frock, something about the fat and filthy-colored palms, that made the wearer long to smash everything within her reach. Some of Val's wildest misdeeds could have been traced to that green poplin. While the abhorred garment held together, even her pretty, slim bronze boots were powerless to cheer a heart so deep bowed down.
Emmie's clothes seemed never to wear out; it was part of her almost invariable advantage over Val. Mrs. Gano more than once pointed out that Val succeeded in working her toes through three pairs of boots while Emmie was carefully wearing one.
"Emmie isn't the captain at prisoner's base," the accused would say, in self-defence, "and she doesn't walk miles and miles with father on Sunday afternoons."