Americans -- England -- Fiction; Children of the rich -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction
“Look, Rosy,” she said. “There is Mrs. Treat Hilyar in the second
carriage to the right. You remember Josie Treat Hilyar married Lord
Varick's son.”
In the landau designated an elderly woman with wonderfully-dressed
white hair sat smiling and bowing to friends who were walking. Lady
Anstruthers, despite her eagerness, shrank back a little, hoping to
escape being seen.
“Oh, it is the Lows she is speaking to--Tom and Alice--I did not know
they had sailed yet.”
The tall, well-groomed young man, with the nice, ugly face, was showing
white teeth in a gay smile of recognition, and his pretty wife was
lightly waving a slim hand in a grey suede glove.
“How cheerful and nice-tempered they look,” said Rosy. “Tom was only
twenty when I saw him last. Whom did he marry?”
“An English girl. Such a love. A Devonshire gentleman's daughter. In New
York his friends called her Devonshire Cream and Roses. She is one of
the pretty, flushy, pink ones.”
“How nice Bond Street is on a spring morning like this,” said Lady
Anstruthers. “You may laugh at me for saying it, Betty, but somehow it
seems to me more spring-like than the country.”
“How clever of you!” laughed Betty. “There is so much truth in it.”
The people walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and
plans. The colours they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the
men's buttonholes belonged to the season. The cheerful crowds of people
and carriages had a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested
freshness. Later in the year everything looks more tired. Now things
were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that this
year would be better than last. “Look at the shop windows,” said Betty,
“full of whites and pinks and yellows and blues--the colours of hyacinth
and daffodil beds. It seems as if they insist that there never has been
a winter and never will be one. They insist that there never was and
never will be anything but spring.”
“It's in the air.” Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one. “It
is just what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue.”
Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats
and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the
lapels of their coats, and the holiday look in their faces, she noted so
many of a familiar type that she began to look for and try to pick them
out with quite excited interest.
“I believe that woman is an American,” she would say. “That girl looks
as if she were a New Yorker,” again. “That man's face looks as if it
belonged to Broadway. Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say
those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came
from out West and are going to buy thousands of things. Don't they look
like it?”
She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so
unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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