Miser that she was, she made him take higher fees than he ordinarily charged, and they saved him again and again from despair in the face of the increasing expense of his home.
In her desperate eagerness to fight off retirement from the ranks of youth, Patty relied more and more on the dressmakers and hat-makers. She developed a passion for jewelry and she spent great sums at the Daguerrean galleries.
She would sit in frozen poses for six minutes at a time, trying to obtain a plate that would flatter her sufficiently. But her beauty was in her expression and especially in its fleetness, and the miracle of Daguerre was helpless. The mist that clothed Niagara in a veil of grace was not itself when winter made it ice. And Patty’s soul, so sweet and captivating as it flitted about her eyes and lips, became another soul when it must shackle itself and die.
Only a few colors were advantageous in the new process and those were the least happy in Patty’s rainbow. Yet she dressed and fixed her smiles and endured the agony of feeling a compelled laughter curdle into an inane smirk. And she would weep with hatred of her counterfeit presentment when it came home from Brady’s or Insley’s or Gurney’s.
Immy fared little better there for all her youth. And her costliness increased appallingly, for she must keep pace with the daughters of wealth. When she went shabby it reflected on her father’s love or his success, and Patty could stifle his fiercest protest by simply murmuring:
“Hasn’t the poor child suffered enough without having to be denied the common necessities of a well-bred girl?”
This stung RoBards into prodigies of extravagance, and Immy’s wildest recklessness took on the pathos of a frightened child fleeing from vultures of grief.
He could not even protest when he saw that she was taking up the disgusting vice of “dipping.” Snuff-taking had lost its vogue among the beaux, and only the elders preferred it to smoking tobacco.
But now the women and girls were going mad over it. In the pockets of their skirts they carried great horn snuff-boxes filled with the strongest Scottish weed. Stealing away from the sight of men, they would spread a handkerchief over their laps, open the boxes, and dipping the odious mixture on a little hickory mop, fill their pretty mouths with it and rub it on their teeth. They seemed to take some stimulus from the stuff, and the secrecy of it added a final tang.
All the men were arrayed against it, but their wrath gave it the further charm of defiant wickedness.