The Copy-Cat, and Other StoriesFreeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
General
The Copy-Cat, and Other Stories
Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
New England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories
Miss Carew, with all her haste to assume years, remained a pretty
woman, softly slim, with an abundance of dark hair, showing little gray.
Sometimes Jane reflected, uneasily, that it ought at her time of life to
be entirely gray. She hoped nobody would suspect her of dyeing it. She
wore it parted in the middle, folded back smoothly, and braided in
a compact mass on the top of her head. The style of her clothes was
slightly behind the fashion, just enough to suggest conservatism and
age. She carried a little silver-bound bag in one nicely gloved hand;
with the other she held daintily out of the dust of the platform her
dress-skirt. A glimpse of a silk frilled petticoat, of slender feet, and
ankles delicately slim, was visible before the onslaught of the wind.
Jane Carew made no futile effort to keep her skirts down before the
wind-gusts. She was so much of the gentlewoman that she could be gravely
oblivious to the exposure of her ankles. She looked as if she had never
heard of ankles when her black silk skirts lashed about them. She rose
superbly above the situation. For some abstruse reason Margaret's
skirts were not affected by the wind. They might have been weighted with
buckram, although it was no longer in general use. She stood, except for
her veering bonnet, as stiffly immovable as a wooden doll.
Miss Carew seldom left Wheaton. This visit to New York was an
innovation. Quite a crowd gathered about Jane's sole-leather trunk when
it was dumped on the platform by the local expressman. “Miss Carew is
going to New York,” one said to another, with much the same tone as
if he had said, “The great elm on the common is going to move into Dr.
Jones's front yard.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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