Miss Jewett, her father, and Mr. Hammerton were her sole encouragers and advisers; Mr. Towne was not aware that she dipped her pen in ink for any one’s pleasure but his own. Beside this work there were friends to entertain, half the girldom in Dunellen were her friends or had been at some time.
Ralph Towne often wondered how she was “taking” it; he could have found no sign of it in her face or in her life. Her father feared that she was being overworked. Mr. Hammerton’s short-sighted eyes noticed a shadow flit across her eyes, sometimes, when she was talking to him, and said to himself, “I see her often; I see a change that is not a change; there is something happening that no one knows.”
III.—THE LAST NIGHT OF THE OLD YEAR.
All her life she had longed for personal beauty; she loved every beautiful thing and she wanted to love her own face. It was Ralph Towne’s perfect face that had drawn her to him, his voice, and his eyes, like the woods in October.
She had studied her face times enough by lamplight and sunlight to know it thoroughly, but she could not discover the sweetness that Miss Jewett saw, or the intelligence that delighted her father; she could find without much searching the freckles on her nose, the shortness of her upper lip, the two slight marks that infantile chicken-pox had dented into her forehead, the upward tendency of her nose, and the dimple that was only half a dimple in her chin.
She was as pretty and as homely as any of the fair, blue-eyed girls in Dunellen or elsewhere: with lips that shaped themselves with every passing feeling; with eyes that could grow so bright and dark that one could forget how bright they were; with the palest of chestnut hair, worn high or low, as the little world of Dunellen demanded; with hands slight and characteristic; a figure neither tall nor slender, but perfectly proportioned, rounded and graceful; arrayed as neatly and becomingly as she could be on her limited allowance, usually in plain colors, often in black of a soft texture with a ribbon of some pale tint at her throat and among her braids. A stranger might have taken her for any one of the twenty-three girls in Miss Jewett’s Bible class; that is any one of the blue-eyed ones who wore gray vails and gray walking suits.
But you and I know better.
With her self-depreciation she was one thing that she was not likely to guess—the prettiest talker in the world.
Felix Harrison had told Miss Jewett so years ago.
“I haven’t any accomplishments,” she often sighed.