"Emmeline Tuttle is a little too pleased with being Emmeline Tuttle. I am sending a dress this moment home from Vincent for Selina to wear."
On reaching home from the morning's teaching, Selina came hurrying up to her mother's room to see it. Unboxed and laid on the bed, it was an impressive affair, and the color rushed to her cheeks, and her hands sought each other rapturously. Satin puffs in a high-light green obtruded through slashes in a myrtle-green satin waist and sleeves. From the throat arose something akin to a Medici collar, and the skirt flowed away in plenitude. A beaded headdress for the hair of a seemingly fish-net nature completed the whole.
There was no question Mrs. Wistar and Auntie were dubious. They looked their worry.
"Is it Mary, Queen of Scots, in a steel engraving, it makes me think of," from Auntie in an anxiously low voice to Mamma, "or is it Amy Robsart in our pictorial volume of Scott's heroines?"
"Madame Vincent is always so ahead and so extreme in her styles," fretted Mamma, "and yet," still more fretted, "Anna may be depended on never to forgive us if she isn't allowed to wear it."
"Before the mirror trying on the dress from Cousin Anna."
They looked at Selina with her eager color and prettily disordered hair and shining eyes, already slipped out of her everyday dress of sober plaids, dear loving child, and before the mirror, trying on the dress from Cousin Anna.
"Mull and lace and a sash is the proper thing for her at her age, I don't care if her dress is dabby. And it's a poor rule to be beholden to anybody," held Auntie.