DEAR FRANK,--I received your kind letter a week ago, but we
have been very busy having a dressmaker and doing all our fall
shopping, and I have not had time to answer it before. We shall
begin to go to school next week, for the vacations are over,
and then I shall have ever so much studying to do. I am to take
lessons on the piano, too, and shall have to practice two hours
a day. In the winter we shall have dancing-school and
practicing parties. Aunt has had a new bonnet made for me. She
did not like the plain black silk one. This is of _gros
d'Afrique_, with little bands and cordings round the crown and
front; and I have a dress of _gros d'Afrique_, too, trimmed
with double folds piped on. For every-day I have a new black
_mousseline_ with white clover leaves on it, and an all-black
French chally to wear to dinner. I don't wear my black and
white calico at all. Next summer aunt means to have me wear
white almost all the time, with lavender and violet ribbons. I
shall have a white muslin with three skirts and a black sash to
wear to parties and to Public Saturdays, next winter. They have
Public Saturdays at dancing-school every three weeks. But only
the parents and relations can come. Alice and Geraldine dance
the shawl-dance with Helena Pomeroy, with crimson and white
Canton crape scarfs. They have showed me some of it at home.
Aunt Oferr says I shall learn the _gavotte_.
Aunt Oferr's house is splendid. The drawing-room is full of
sofas, and divans, and ottomans, and a _causeuse_, a little
S-shaped seat for two people. Everything is covered with blue
velvet, and there are blue silk curtains to the windows, and
great looking-glasses between, that you can see all down into
through rooms and rooms, as if there were a hundred of them. Do
you remember the story Luclarion used to tell us of when she
and her brother Mark were little children and used to play that
the looking-glass-things were real, and that two children lived
in them, in the other room, and how we used to make believe too
in the slanting chimney glass? You could make believe it here
with _forty_ children. But I don't make believe much now. There
is such a lot that is real, and it is all so grown up. It would
seem so silly to have such plays, you know. I can't help
thinking the things that come into my head though, and it seems
sometimes just like a piece of a story, when I walk into the
drawing-room all alone, just before company comes, with my
_gros d'Afrique_ on, and my puffed lace collar, and my hair
tied back with long new black ribbons. It all goes through my
head just how I look coming in, and how grand it is, and what
the words would be in a book about it, and I seem to act a
little bit, just to myself as if I were a girl in a story, and
it seems to say, "And Laura walked up the long drawing-room and
took a book bound in crimson morocco from the white marble pier
table and sat down upon the velvet ottoman in the balcony
window." But what happened then it never tells. I suppose it
will by and by. I am getting used to it all, though; it isn't
so _awfully_ splendid as it was at first.
I forgot to tell you that my new bonnet flares a great deal,
and that I have white lace quilling round the face with little
black dotty things in it on stems. They don't wear those close
cottage bonnets now. And aunt has had my dresses made longer
and my pantalettes shorter, so that they hardly show at all.
She says I shall soon wear long dresses, I am getting so tall.
Alice wears them now, and her feet look so pretty, and she has
such pretty slippers: little French purple ones, and sometimes
dark green, and sometimes beautiful light gray, to go with
different dresses. I don't care for anything but the slippers,
but I _should_ like such ones as hers. Aunt says I can't, of
course, as long as I wear black, but I can have purple ones
next summer to wear with my white dresses. That will be when I
come to see you.
I am afraid you will think this is a very _wearing_ kind of a
letter, there are so many 'wears' in it. I have been reading it
over so far, but I can't put in any other word.
Your affectionate sister,
LAURA SHIERE.
P.S. Aunt Oferr says Laura Shiere is such a good sounding name.
It doesn't seem at all common. I am glad of it. I should hate
to be common.
I do not think I shall give you any more of it just here than these
two letters tell. We are not going through all Frank and Laura's
story. That with which we have especially to do lies on beyond. But
it takes its roots in this, as all stories take their roots far back
and underneath.
Two years after, Laura was in Homesworth for her second summer visit
at the farm. It was convenient, while the Oferrs were at Saratoga.
Mrs. Oferr was very much occupied now, of course, with introducing
her own daughters. A year or two later, she meant to give Laura a
season at the Springs. "All in turn, my dear, and good time," she
said.
The winter before, Frank had been a few weeks in New York. But it
tired her dreadfully, she said. She liked the theatres and the
concerts, and walking out and seeing the shops. But there was "no
place to get out of it into." It didn't seem as if she ever really
got home and took off her things. She told Laura it was like that
first old letter of hers; it was just "wearing," all the time.
Laura laughed. "But how can you live _without_ wearing?" said she.
Frank stood by, wondering, while Laura unpacked her trunks that
morning after her second arrival at Aunt Oldways'. She had done now
even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her wardrobe
blossomed out like the flush of a summer garden.
She unfolded a rose-colored muslin, with little raised embroidered
spots, and threw it over the bed.
"Where _will_ you wear that, up here?" asked Frank, in pure
bewilderment.
"Why, I wear it to church, with my white Swiss mantle," answered
Laura. "Or taking tea, or anything. I've a black silk _visite_ for
cool days. That looks nice with it. And see here,--I've a pink
sunshade. They don't have them much yet, even in New York. Mr.
Pemberton Oferr brought these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice,
and me. Gerry's is blue. See! it tips back." And Laura set the dashy
little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly.
"They used them in carriages in Paris, he said, and in St.
Petersburg, driving out on the Nevskoi Prospekt."
"But where are your common things?"
"Down at the bottom; I haven't come to them. They were put in first,
because they would bear squeezing. I've two French calicoes, with
pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the
front."
Laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of
the style.
Laura astonished Homesworth the first Sunday of this visit, with her
rose-colored toilet. Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds
and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two
starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of
tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink tassel.
"They're the things I wear; why shouldn't I?" she said to Frank's
remonstrance.
"But up here!" said Frank. "It would seem nicer to wear
something--stiller."
So it would; a few years afterward Laura herself would have seen
that it was more elegant; though Laura Shiere was always rather
given to doing the utmost--in apparel--that the occasion tolerated.
Fashions grew stiller in years after. But this June Sunday,
somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into
the village church like an Aurora, and the village long remembered
the resplendence. Frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real
rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her
"cottage straw" was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the
crown.
"Do you feel any better?" asked Aunt Oldways of Laura, when they
came home to the country tea-dinner.
"Better--how?" asked Laura, in surprise.
"After all that 'wear' and _stare_," said Aunt Oldways, quietly.
Aunt Oldways might have been astonished, but she was by no means
awestruck, evidently; and Aunt Oldways generally spoke her mind.
Somehow, with Laura Shiere, pink was pinker, and ribbons were more
rustling than with most people. Upon some quiet unconscious folks,
silk makes no spread, and color little show; with Laura every gleam
told, every fibre asserted itself. It was the live Aurora, bristling
and tingling to its farthest electric point. She did not toss or
flaunt, either; she had learned better of Signor Pirotti how to
carry herself; but she was in conscious _rapport_ with every thing
and stitch she had about her. Some persons only put clothes on to
their bodies; others really seem to contrive to put them on to their
souls.
Laura Shiere came up to Homesworth three years later, with something
more wonderful than a pink embossed muslin:--she had a lover.
Mrs. Oferr and her daughters were on their way to the mountains;
Laura was to be left with the Oldways. Grant Ledwith accompanied
them all thus far on their way; then he had to go back to Boston.
"I can't think of anything but that pink sunshade she used to carry
round canted all to one side over her shoulder," said Aunt Oldways,
looking after them down the dusty road the morning that he went
away. Laura, in her white dress and her straw hat and her silly
little bronze-and-blue-silk slippers printing the roadside gravel,
leaning on Grant Ledwith's arm, seemed only to have gained a fresh,
graceful adjunct to set off her own pretty goings and comings with,
and to heighten the outside interest of that little point of
eternity that she called her life. Mr. Ledwith was not so much a man
who had won a woman, as Laura was a girl who had "got a beau."
She had sixteen tucked and trimmed white skirts, too, she told
Frank; she should have eight more before she was married; people
wore ever so many skirts now, at a time. She had been to a party a
little while ago where she wore _seven_.
There were deep French embroidery bands around some of these white
skirts; those were beautiful for morning dresses. Geraldine Oferr
was married last winter; Laura had been her bridesmaid; Gerry had a
white brocade from Paris, and a point-lace veil. She had three dozen
of everything, right through. They had gone to housekeeping up town,
in West Sixteenth Street. Frank would have to come to New York next
winter, or in the spring, to be _her_ bridesmaid; then she would
see; then--who knew!
Frank was only sixteen, and she lived away up here in Homesworth
among the hills; she had not "seen," but she had her own little
secret, for all that; something she neither told nor thought, yet
which was there; and it came across her with a queer little thrill
from the hidden, unlooked-at place below thought, that "Who"
_didn't_ know.
Laura waited a year for Grant Ledwith's salary to be raised to
marrying point; he was in a wholesale woolen house in Boston; he was
a handsome fellow, with gentlemanly and taking address,--capital,
this, for a young salesman; and they put his pay up to two thousand
dollars within that twelvemonth. Upon this, in the spring, they
married; took a house in Filbert Street, down by the river, and set
up their little gods. These were: a sprinkle of black walnut and
brocatelle in the drawing-room, a Sheffield-plate tea-service, and a
crimson-and-giltedged dinner set that Mrs. Oferr gave them; twilled
turkey-red curtains, that looked like thibet, in the best chamber;
and the twenty-four white skirts and the silk dresses, and whatever
corresponded to them on the bride-groom's part, in their wardrobes.
All that was left of Laura's money, and all that was given them by
Grant Ledwith's father, and Mr. Titus Oldways' astounding present of
three hundred dollars, without note or comment,--the first reminder
they had had of him since Edward Shiere's funeral, "and goodness
knew how he heard anything now," Aunt Oferr said,--had gone to this
outfit. But they were well set up and started in the world; so
everybody said, and so they, taking the world into their young,
confident hands for a plaything, not knowing it for the perilous
loaded shell it is, thought, merrily, themselves.
Up in Homesworth people did not have to wait for two thousand dollar
salaries. They would not get them if they did.
Oliver Ripwinkley, the minister's son, finished his medical studies
and city hospital practice that year, and came back, as he had
always said he should do, to settle down for a country doctor. Old
Doctor Parrish, the parson's friend of fifty years, with no child of
his own, kept the place for Oliver, and hung up his old-fashioned
saddle-bags in the garret the very day the young man came home. He
was there to be "called in," however, and with this backing, and the
perforce of there being nobody else, young Doctor Ripwinkley had ten
patients within the first week; thereby opportunity for shewing
himself in the eyes of ten families as a young man who "appeared to
know pretty well what he was about."
So that when he gave further proof of the same, by asking, within
the week that followed, the prettiest girl in Homesworth, Frances
Shiere, to come and begin the world with him at Mile Hill village,
nobody, not even Frank herself, was astonished.
She bought three new gowns, a shawl, a black silk mantle, and a
straw bonnet. She made six each of every pretty white garment that a
woman wears; and one bright mellow evening in September, they took
their first tea in the brown-carpeted, white-shaded little corner
room in the old "Rankin house;" a bigger place than they really
wanted yet, and not all to be used at first; but rented
"reasonable," central, sunshiny, and convenient; a place that they
hoped they should buy sometime; facing on the broad sidegreen of the
village street, and running back, with its field and meadow
belongings, away to the foot of great, gray, sheltering Mile Hill.
And the vast, solemn globe, heedless of what lit here or there upon
its breadth, or took up this or that life in its little freckling
cities, or between the imperceptible foldings of its hills,--only
carrying way-passengers for the centuries,--went plunging on its
track, around and around, and swept them all, a score of times,
through its summer and its winter solstices.