The talk turned naturally upon the girl herself. Having failed to get
any biography from the embattled Miss Wing, Charles proceeded to the
source. Under his agreeable, yet artful promptings, Miss Angela sketched
with a charming simplicity the story of a commonplace family life: how
she and her brothers had grown up at Hunter's Run, a crossroads
post-office four miles from Mitchellton; how they had moved into
Mitchellton, which had seemed like heaven at first, but had palled after
seven years; how all the boys of Mitchellton grew up and went away, one
by one, to make their marks in the world (though there was one
exception, it seemed, a Mr. Dan Jenney, who was still in
Mitchellton--Aha! thought Charles); how lonely she was after Tommy, her
older brother, had thus gone away; how her father had had quite a large
practice in Mitchellton, but didn't seem much interested in getting
patients here; and so on. Tommy, it was learned, had married money in
Pittsburg, but appeared to be happy all the same. As for the younger
brother, Wallie, his ambition was to go to college and be an
electro-chemist, and he was now at work downtown, gathering funds for
that purpose. Mary Wing had got him a position, it seemed.
Miss Angela's conversation, as has been noted, was not remarkable as
conversation. But what mattered that? Into an atmosphere too heated by
the Trevennas of this Unrestful world, her girlish unsophistications
blew like a primrose zephyr. Moreover, she had her moments, you may be
sure; her vivacities as honest as wit. She said that Mitchellton was
like a town in war-time.
"That's the way a man described it to me once, a surveyor from the
North, when he'd only been there three hours! He declared he hadn't seen
a male between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five. They'd all gone off,
you see--"
"And then the surveyor went off, too?"
"He did!--exactly! Hopped on a funny little calico pony he had, the
minute he said that, and trotted off down Main Street. We never saw him
again."
Charles, laughing, looked down at her. She wore a plain blue suit and a
simple hat with a yellow quill, obviously inexpensive both, and not new.
She was characterized, sartorially, only by that unobtrusive yet
exquisite neatness whose practice some women bring to a fine art. Pretty
and sweet she looked, none the less; feminine, too, without a doubt.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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