“Why, they are to room with me,” Miss Hansford exclaimed, when she heard their names. “They must be about my age.”
This reconciled her to certain innovations in her dress as to what was suitable for her.
“I’m sixty-five years old, and I can’t have too many curlycues,” she said, but after seeing the dresses of women as old or older than she was, with Y-shaped necks and elbow sleeves, she gave herself into the modiste’s hands and came out a surprise to herself.
“Why, auntie, you look real handsome and young,” Elithe exclaimed, with delight, when the dress was tried on in their rooms at the hotel.
“I look like an old fool trying to be young,” Miss Hansford responded, examining herself critically before the glass and declaring the demi-train too long, the skirt too wide and the sleeves too big. On the whole, however, she was satisfied, and, folding her dress carefully, laid it in one of the large packing boxes necessary to hold all her purchases. Her shopping expedition had been very successful, and she only rebelled mentally at her hotel bill for rooms. She paid it, however, and just a week from the day she left Oak City, she sailed up to the wharf in the afternoon boat, poorer by some hundred dollars, but happy in the thought that no one could find a flaw in Elithe’s costume, which was as faultless as a Boston tailor could make it. “Elithe could hold her head with the best of them,” she thought, as she walked behind her through the crowd always down to see the boat come in, and felt her heart swell with pride as she saw how many turned to look at the young girl so transformed that Paul, who was at the landing, did not at first recognize her. He had stopped at the cottage every day during the week, and had been disappointed when he found it closed each time. Something was missing which made his life at that particular period very happy. To bathe with Clarice, to drive with her, to wheel with her, to waltz with her and sit with her on the beach, looking out upon the great ocean, listening to its constant beat upon the sands and talking of the future opening so bright before them was very delightful, and kept him up to fever heat, except when he came down from the Elysian heights and spent a half hour with Elithe. She rested him, and he liked to hear her talk of a kind of life he had never known, but which, as she described it, seemed rather attractive than otherwise. She told him of the miners at Deep Gulch; of the pony they gave her and the rides on Sunday through the wild cañons to the camp where her father held service, and of her once staying there all night with a sick man, who was recovering from delirium tremens. She did not tell him who it was, nor did he ask her. She usually did the most of the talking while he watched her glowing face and her eyes brightening and widening as she talked, and then drooping modestly when she caught him looking at her admiringly, as he often did. He liked to see the color in her cheeks change from a delicate rose tint to a brilliant hue, as she laughed and chatted and grew excited or interested. Clarice seldom or never blushed; Elithe blushed all the time, and he liked it. He was interested in every pretty girl. Elithe was more than pretty and of an entirely different type from most of the young ladies whom he knew and who held rather loose views with regard to what young men should be. To be fast was nothing; to drink was nothing, if their vices were kept in the background, or covered over with gold. Not to drink,—not to be fast,—was no recommendation. Paul neither drank nor was fast in the usual acceptation of the term, but the money at his back atoned for these deficiences, and Clarice had accepted him gladly, feeling sure she could soon cure him of his Puritanical notions and bring him up to her plane of morals. To a certain extent he was already being influenced by her in the wrong direction, when Elithe came into his life, becoming so much a part of it that the days when he did not see her lacked something which had become necessary to him. During the week she was gone he went to meet every boat, hoping to find her on it, and felt disappointed when she was not there. What was her aunt doing in Boston so long, he wondered, and once half made up his mind to go to the city and find out. It was rather a strange phase of affairs for a young man soon to be married to one girl to be thinking so much of another, but Paul did not analyze his feelings, and was inexpressibly glad when he at last ran against Elithe on the wharf, thinking her a stranger at first, and saying, “I beg pardon, Miss.”
He had been looking for a blue flannel dress and hat with faded ribbons and tarnished red wing, and, not finding it, was turning away, when he backed against Elithe.
“Why, Elithe,” he said, offering her his hand and taking her new satchel from her. “Why did you stay so long? It seems an age since you went away. It does, upon my soul. Hallo, Aunt Phebe! How are you? Let me take that bag.”
It was not as fine looking as Elithe’s; it was old and glazed and black, and her umbrella was a cotton one loosely rolled up, but he took them both and looked like a hotel porter, as he walked beside the ladies, wondering why Elithe seemed different and more like the young girls he was to meet that afternoon at the tennis grounds on Oceanside. It dawned upon him just as the cottage was reached and he was waiting for Miss Hansford to unlock the door. Dropping the bags and umbrellas and laying his hand familiarly upon Elithe’s shoulder, he said: “I say, arn’t we gotten up swell since we went to Boston? That hat is awfully becoming to you, and that thing-em-er-jig,” indicating the front of her shirt waist. “Somebody has done you up brown.”
“Is she all right?” Miss Hansford asked, beaming with delight at Paul’s commendation.
“All right? I should say she was. I haven’t seen such a stunner this season,” Paul replied, warming with his subject, while Elithe blushed scarlet and tried to divert his attention from herself.