TISSUE-PAPER HATS
Blame it all on those tissue-paper hats; the surprise and horror of good Mrs. Ramsey when she beheld Alene Dawson among that madcap crowd, skipping along gaily intent on her play, unobserving the pained expression of the portly lady who was coming up the other side of the street. Mrs. Ramsey had stopped suddenly, "so flustrated by the sight," as she said later, that she had not the strength to hail Alene and when her breath came it was too late, the happy crowd had passed from sight around the corner leading to the fields, and her feeble, "Why, Alene Dawson, I'll tell your Uncle about this!" sounded no farther than her own ears.
Panting with indignation and the heat of the day, she resumed her way up the steep street and in due time reached her home, a showy, buff brick house with fancy turrets and pointed roofs and tiny windows with wooden ornamentations, that gave warning of the interior, where none of the rooms was of good size or well proportioned. Most of the space on the first floor was taken by the reception hall which was not often used and the whole gave the impression of being built to show off the hall, of which its owner was very proud.
She was also very proud of her two daughters, Hermione and Vera, whom she found on this occasion sitting in the study, a tiny alcove on the second story, which overlooked the garden. They were apparently deep in the mysteries of a French grammar which Vera had seized on hearing the click of the gate announcing Mrs. Ramsey's return, while Hermione busied herself in hiding under the cushion of her chair two borrowed books of fairy tales which their mother had denounced and forbidden and banned and would have burned with a zeal like to that which animated the burners of the witches.
"When I was your age I never cared for reading. I knew most books were lies from beginning to end. You couldn't hire me to read about goblins and witches," she often declared.
"What a dull, tiresome girl mamma must have been," said Vera in a low aside.
"But she didn't have to play exercises on the piano!" returned Hermione.
"No, nor try to parlez vous with a gibbering foreigner."
"I don't see any use for foreign babbling. As the nurse in the French tale says to the little girl who is studying English, 'Since the bon dieu wrote the Bible in French, it shows that he thought it good enough for anybody,'" said Hermione, laughing, and Vera continued,
"Grandpa was too poor to pay for extras, I guess."