Miss Ann had dignity enough to carry off broken steps, shabby baggage, rickety carriage—anything. She emerged from the coach with the air of being visiting royalty conferring a favor on her lowly subjects by stopping with them. Her dignity even overtopped the fact 30 that her auburn wig was on crooked and a long lock of snow-white hair had straggled from its moorings and crept from the confines of the purple quilted-satin poke bonnet. The beauty which had been hers in her youth was still hers although everybody could not see it. Uncle Billy could see it and Jeff Bucknor glimpsed it, as his old cousin stepped from her dingy coach. He had never realized before that Cousin Ann Peyton had lines and proportions that must always be beautiful—a set of the head, a slope of shoulder, a length of limb, a curve of wrist and a turn of ankle. The old purple poke bonnet might have been a diadem, so high did she carry her head; and she floated along in the midst of her voluminous skirts like a belle of the sixties—which she had been and still was in the eyes of her devoted old servant.
Miss Peyton wore hoop skirts. Where she got them was often conjectured. Surely she could not be wearing the same ones she had worn in the sixties and everybody knew that the articles were no longer manufactured. Big Josh had declared on one occasion when some of the relatives had waxed jocose on the subject of Cousin Ann and her style of dress, that she had bought a gross of hoop skirts cheap at the time when they were going out of style and had them 31 stored in his attic—but then everybody knew that Big Josh would say anything that popped into his head and then swear to it and Little Josh would back him up.
“By heck, there’s no room in the attic for trunks,” he had insisted. “Hoop skirts everywhere! Boxes of ’em! Barrels of ’em! Hanging from the rafters like Japanese lanterns! Standing up in the corners like ghosts scaring a fellow to death! I can’t keep servants at all because of Cousin Ann Peyton’s buying that gross of hoop skirts. Little Josh will bear me out in this.”
And Little Josh would, although the truth of the matter was that Cousin Ann had only one hoop skirt, and it was the same she had worn in the sixties. Inch by inch its body had been renewed to reclaim it from the ravages of time until not one iota of the original garment was left. Here a tape and there a wire had been carefully changed, but always the hoop kept its original form. The spirit of the sixties still breathed from it and it enveloped Miss Ann as in olden days.
CHAPTER III
Cousin Ann Is Affronted
Mrs. Bucknor stood aside while Uncle Billy and Jeff unpacked the carriage but as the visitor emerged she came forward. “How do you do, Cousin Ann?” she said, trying to put some warmth in her remark. “Have you driven far?”
Cousin Ann leaned over stiffly and gave her hostess a perfunctory peck on her cheek. “We left Cousin Betty Throckmorton’s this morning,” she said with a toss of the purple poke bonnet.