“It floats so,” said Patience, ecstatically. “Oh, auntie, you are a beauty.”
“I a beauty with my ugly scowling old face? But this thing is like a ball dress, Patience—this thin stuff! I prefer the satin.”
“You will wear this on the hot evenings. All thin things are not made for the ball-room. You needn’t look at yourself like that. I only wish I’d ever be half as pretty. Auntie, why didn’t you ever marry?”
Miss Tremont’s face worked after all the years. Memories could not die in so uniform a nature.
“My youth was very sad,” she said, turning away abruptly. “I only talk about it with the dear Lord.” And Patience asked no more questions.
VI
The dressmaker was sent for, and the satin gown divested of its collar. Miss Tremont ruthlessly clipped off the beautiful French bows and sewed a tiny one of narrow white ribbon in a conspicuous place on the left chest. The grenadine was decorated in like manner. Patience wailed, and then laughed as she thought of Mrs. Gardiner Peele. She wished she might be there to see that lady’s face.
Miss Tremont changed her mind four times as to the possibility of leaving Mariaville for a week of sinful idleness, before she was finally assisted into the train by Patience’s firm hand. Even then she abruptly left her seat and started for the door. But the train was moving. Patience saw her resume her seat with an impatient twitch of her shoulders.
“Poor auntie,” she thought, as she walked up the street; “but on the whole I think I pity Mrs. Peele more.”
Her bag had been sent to Temperance Hall, and she went directly there, and to her own room. As the day was very warm, she exchanged her frock for a print wrapper, then extended herself on the bed with “’93.” It was her duty to assuage the wrath of Maria Twist, but she made up her mind that for twenty-four hours she would shirk every duty on her calendar.