The Dew of Their Youth

by S. R. Crockett

Now it happened that though there were a good many dressmakers in Eden Valley, including some that worked out for so much a day, there was only one Ladies’ Milliner and Mantua-maker. This was the sister of our infant-mistress, Miss Huntingdon. Her establishment was in itself a kind of select academy. She had an irreproachable connection, and though she worked much and well with her nimble fingers, she got most of her labour free by an ingenious method.

She initiated into her mysteries none of the poorer girls of the place, who might in time be tempted to “set up for themselves,” and so spoil their employer’s market. She received only, as temporary boarders, daughters of good houses, generally pretty girls looking forward with some confidence to managing houses of their own. At that time every girl who set up to be anything in our part of the country aspired to make her own dresses and build the imposing fabric of her own bonnets.

So Miss Huntingdon had a full house of pretty maidens who came as “approvers”—a fanciful variation of “improvers” invented by Miss Huntingdon herself, and used whenever she spoke of “My young ladies,” which she did all day long—or at least as often as she was called into the “down-stairs parlour,” where (as in a nunnery) ordinary business was transacted.

A good many of the elder girls whom I had known at the Academy had migrated there at the close of their period of education—several who, though great maidens of seventeen or eighteen, had hardly appeared upon my father’s purely classical horizon—seen by him only at the Friday’s general review of English and history, and taught for the rest of the week by little Mr. Stephen, by myself—and in sewing, fancy-work, and the despised samplers by Miss Huntingdon, the ever diligent, who, to say the truth, acted in this matter as jackal to her elder sister’s lion.

In return she got a chamber, a seat at the table with the young ladies, and a home. Nor will I say that Miss Seraphina, Ladies’ Milliner and Mantua-maker, was not a good and kind sister to Miss Rebecca, the little teacher at thirty pounds a year in the Infant Department at the Academy of Eden Valley.

But my mother in her time—Aunt Janet, even—had passed that way, though Miss Huntingdon considered Jen one of her failures because she had not “married from her house.” Most of the well-to-do farmers within ten miles sent their daughters to complete their education at Miss Huntingdon’s academy of the needle and the heavy blocking-iron. My father, when he passed, did not know them, so great in his eyes was their fall. Yet by quiet persistence, of which she had the secret, my mother wore him down to winking at her sending Agnes Anne there for three hours a day.

“I’m sure,” she said, “I used to watch for you every time you went by to school, and one day the frill of your shirt sleeve was hanging down, torn on a nail. I was sorry, and wished that I could have run out and mended it for you!”

What this reminiscence had to do with Agnes Anne’s being allowed to go to Miss Huntingdon’s I do not quite see. But learned men are much like others, and somehow the little speech softened my father. So Agnes Anne went, as, indeed, my mother had resolved from the beginning that she should. And it was through Agnes Anne that my temptation came.

She made a friend there. Agnes Anne always must have one bosom friend of her own sex. For this Irma was too old, as well as too brilliant, too fitful, fairylike, changeful in her mood to serve long. Besides, she awed Agnes Anne too much to allow her to confide in her properly. And without hour-long confessions all about nothing, Agnes Anne had no use for any girl friend. There was an unwritten convention that one should listen sympathetically to the other’s tale of secrets, no matter how long and involved, always on the supposition that the service should be mutual.

Charlotte Anderson was the name of Agnes Anne’s friend. In a week’s time these two were seldom separate, and wandered about our garden, and under the tall pine umbrellas with bent heads and arms lovingly interlaced. Charlotte was a pretty girl, blooming, fresh, rosy, with a pair of bold black eyes which at once denied and defied, and then, as it were, suddenly drooped yieldingly. I was a fool. I might have known—only I did not.