“Particularly at this time of year. It’s warming to the blood on a cold autumn day just to see a dress like this on the street. I always did like a good rich tartan. It becomes me, too. Look, Selina’n’Jane.”
She held the dress material against one cheek, and her sisters looked—but somehow failed to see what a pleasing picture she made. She had just come in from shopping and had not yet removed her hat, and its trimming of foliage repeated the colors of her face—autumnal tints of red and bronze and healthy yellow. She, the eldest of the family and the only unmarried one, was forty-five, but she was rosy and fat and matronly, while her sisters were pinched and anemic. They were old maids by nature, she by chance.
“It becomes you well enough, but under the circumstances,” Jane said, exchanging glances with Selina, “it seems a pity to buy all these things.”
Mary Ann opened her eyes wide.
“Circumstances? What circumstances? It’s no more than I buy every fall,” protested the puzzled Mary Ann. “The flowered piece is for a morning wrapper, the tartan’s for a street suit, and the blue-gray’s a company dress.”
Jane and Selina again exchanged glances, and Selina nodded.
“You never did seem to look ahead, Mary Ann,” said Jane, thus encouraged. “I don’t believe you realize that an attack of bronchitis is serious at Ma’s age. I wouldn’t have got all my clothes colored. It’s never any harm to have one black dress.”
Mary Ann gasped.
“Good gracious!” was all she said.
“Well, Mary Ann,” said Selina, coming to Jane’s rescue, “there’s not a particle of use shutting your eyes to plain facts. Ma’s in a serious condition, and if anything happens to her, what’ll you do with all that stuff? You may dye the blue, but that tartan won’t take a good black.”