“If the dress Mrs. Saunders had on at the church supper was a sample, she dresses like a perfect guy,” said Maria, as they entered the store, with its two pretentious show-windows filled with waxen ladies dressed in the height of the fashion, standing in the midst of symmetrically arranged handkerchiefs and rugs.
Maria knew that she was even cruelly pert to her aunt, but she felt like stinging—like crowding some of the stings out of her own heart. She asked herself was ever any girl so horribly placed as she was, married, and not married; and now she had seen some one else whom she must shun and try to hate, although she wished to love him. Maria felt instinctively, remembering the old scenes over the garden fence, and remembering how she herself had looked that very day as she started out, with her puffy blue velvet turban rising above the soft roll of her fair hair and her face blooming through a film of brown lace, and also remembering George Ramsey's tone as he asked if he might call, that if she were free that things might happen with her as with other girls; that she and George Ramsey might love each other, and become engaged; that she might save her school money for a trousseau, and by-and-by be married to a man of whom she should be very proud. The patches on George Ramsey's trousers became very dim to her. She admired him from the depths of her heart.
“I guess we had better look at flannels first,” Eunice said. “It won't do to get all wool, aside from the expense, for with that Ramsey woman's washing it wouldn't last any time.”
She and her aunt made most of their purchases in Adams & Wood's. They succeeded in obtaining quite a comfortable little outfit for Jessy Ramsey, and at last boarded a car laden with packages. Eunice had a fish-net bag filled to overflowing, but Maria, who, coming from the vicinity of New York, looked down on bags, carried her parcels in her arms.
Directly they were seated in the car Eunice gave Maria a violent nudge with her sharp elbow. “He's on this car,” she whispered in her ear, with a long hiss which seemed to penetrate the girl's brain.
Maria made an impatient movement.
“Don't you think you ought to just step over and thank him?” whispered Eunice. “I'll hold your bundles. He's on the other side, a seat farther back. He raised his hat to me.”
“Hush! I can't here.”
“Well, all right, but I thought it would look sort of polite,” said Eunice. Then she subsided. Once in a while she glanced back at George Ramsey, then uneasily at her niece, but she said nothing more.
The car was crowded. Workmen smelling of leather clung to the straps. One, in the aisle next Maria, who sat on the outside this time, leaned fairly against her. He was a good-looking young fellow, but he had a heavy jaw. He held an unlighted pipe in his mouth, and carried a two-story tin dinner-pail. Maria kept shrinking closer to her aunt, but the young man pressed against her all the more heavily. His eyes were fixed with seeming unconsciousness ahead, but a furtive smile lurked around his mouth.