So this first evening Dolly stared, laughed, blushed, wondered, had half a mind to be provoked, but ended in a hearty liking of her new relative and most agreeable anticipations of her Boston visit. CHAPTER XXXVI. PREPARATIONS FOR SEEING LIFE. The getting ready for Dolly's journey began to be the engrossing topic of the little household. Miss Simpkins, the Poganuc dress-maker, had a permanent corner in the sitting-room, and discoursed _ex cathedra_ on "piping-cord" and "ruffling cut on the bias," and Dolly and Mrs. Cushing and Miss Deborah obediently ran up breadths, hemmed, stitched and gathered at her word of command. The general course of society in those days as to dress and outward adornment did not run with the unchecked and impetuous current that it now does. The matter of dress has become in our day a yoke and a burden, and many a good house-mother is having the springs of her existence sapped by responsibilities connected with pinking and frilling and quilling, and an army of devouring cares as to hemming, stitching and embroidery, for which even the "consolations of religion" provide no panacea. In the simple Puritan days, while they had before their eyes the query of Sacred Writ, "Can a maid forget her ornaments?"--they felt that there was no call to assist the maid in her meditations on this subject. Little girls were assiduously taught that to be neat and clean was the main beauty. Good mothers who had pretty daughters were very reticent of any remarks that might lead in the direction of personal vanity; any extra amount of time spent at the toilet, any apparent anxiety about individual adornment, met a persistent discouragement. Never in all her life before had Dolly heard so much discourse on subjects connected with personal appearance, and, to say the truth, she did not at all enter into it with the abandon and zeal of a girl of our modern days, and found the fitting and trying on and altering rather a tribulation to be conscientiously endured. She gathered, hemmed, stitched and sewed, however, and submitted herself to the trying-on process with resignation. "The child don't seem to think much of dress," said Miss Debby, when alone with her sister. "What is she thinking of, with those great eyes of hers?" "Oh, of things she is planning," said her mother; "of books she is reading, of things her father reads to her, of ways she can help me--in short, of anything but herself." "She is very pretty," said Miss Debby, "and is sure to be very attractive." "Yes," answered her mother, "but Dolly hasn't the smallest notion of anything like coquetry. Now, she has been a good deal admired here, and there have been one or two that would evidently have been glad to go farther; but Dolly cuts everything of that kind short at once. She is very pleasant, very kind, very friendly, up to a certain point, but the moment she is made love to--everything is changed."