“I suppose one can’t expect much from you country people,” she said to Janice when the latter had politely led the horse past the car. “If you chance to get a car you don’t know how to behave on the road with it. Let me tell you, Miss, if I meet you with my horse again and you frighten him, I shall have you arrested—I don’t care who you are.”
“I am sure I am sorry,” Janice said; “but I do not see how it could be helped. The road is free to all sorts of traffic.”
“Well, it ought not to be,” snapped the other, and with a flirt of her whip she sent the horse on his way.
Janice climbed back into her car with rather a grave face. Her aunt was still filled with amazement regarding the frock and hat worn by the strange girl.
“I never did imagine they looked like that when they was on folks,” she murmured. “My goodness, Janice! I dunno as I want you to wear one o’ them dresses, after all. I’d feel as though you warn’t dressed at all. But that plume!”
“Her clothes were quite in the mode, I suppose,” the girl returned; “but her manners were very unpleasant, to say the least.”
“Them city folks is awful proud—’specially the high-flying kind,” Aunt ’Mira agreed. “But that plume!”
Janice suspected that her aunt had her heart fixed upon a similar adornment, and when she picked her up again at one of Middletown’s biggest stores, after driving to the seminary and seeing the principal, Aunt ’Mira had a long pasteboard box clasped against her breast, her round, fat face was hot and perspiring, but she was smiling broadly.
“I got one, Janice!” she whispered, hoarsely, as she wedged herself into the car. “It cost me a sight of money. Don’t tell your Uncle Jason; he’d have a fit.”
“What did you buy it for?” asked Janice, amused.