"Never mind!" Florence thought best to respond. "Never mind!"
"You'd better come _in_," Mrs. Atwater called, her voice necessarily
louder as the party moved onward.
"Never mind!" Florence called back.
Mrs. Atwater leaned out of the window. "Where are you going? Come back
and get your _hat_. You'll get a _sunstroke_!"
Florence was able to conceal her indignation, and merely waved a hand
in airy dismissal as they passed from Mrs. Atwater's sight, leaving her
still shouting.
The daughter smiled negligently and shrugged her shoulders. "She'll get
over it!" she said.
"Who?"
"My mother. She was the one makin' all that noise," said Florence.
"Sometimes I do what she says: sometimes I don't. It's all accordings to
the way I feel." She looked up in her companion's face, and her
expression became politely fond as she thought how uncouth he was, for
in Florence's eye Noble Dill was truly rare, exquisite, and unfamiliar;
and she believed that he was obs, too, whatever that meant. She often
thought about him, and no longer ago than yesterday she had told Kitty
Silver that she couldn't see "how Aunt Julia could _look_ at anybody
else!"
Florence's selection of Noble Dill for the bright favourite of her
dreams was one of her own mysteries. Noble was not beautiful, neither
did he present to the ordinary eye of man anything especially rare,
exquisite, unfamiliar, or even so distinguished as to be obsolete. He
was about twenty-two, but not one of those book-read sportsmen of that
age, confident in clothes and manner, easy travellers and debonair;
that is to say, Noble was not of the worldly type twenty-two. True, he
had graduated from the High-school before entering his father's Real
Estate and Insurance office, but his geographical experiences (in
particular) had been limited to three or four railway excursions, at
special rates, to such points of interest as Mammoth Cave and Petoskey,
Michigan. His other experiences were not more sparkling, and except for
the emotions within him, he was in all the qualities of his mind as well
as in his bodily contours and the apparel sheltering the latter, the
most commonplace person in Florence's visible world. The inner areas of
the first and second fingers of his left hand bore cigarette stains,
seemingly indelible: the first and second fingers of his right hand were
strongly ornamented in a like manner; tokens proving him ambidextrous to
but a limited extent, however. Moreover, his garments and garnitures
were not comparable to those of either Newland Sanders or that dapper
antique, Mr. Ridgely. Noble's straw hat might have brightened under the
treatment of lemon juice or other restorative; his scarf was folded to
hide a spot that worked steadily toward a complete visibility, and some
recent efforts upon his trousers with a tepid iron, in his bedchamber
at home, counteracted but feebly that tendency of cloth to sculpture
itself in hummocks upon repeated pressure of the human knee.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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