at some length, asking cordially about cuts of meat and his family, two matters in which Westley was much absorbed. He declared later that she was "a grand little woman."
There followed pilgrimages that June morning to the First National Bank and to several of our lesser establishments; pilgrimages rarely diverting to Little Arcady and which invariably provoked bows under strangely lifted hats.
But there were Little Arcadians of Miss Caroline's own sex to whom she might not so swiftly fetch confusion. Aunt Delia McCormick devoted a chance view of the newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one originally built some years before the war. Later she found what our ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves of ancient Godey's magazines.
Mrs. Judge Robinson, from one sidelong glance, brought off detailed intelligence of the bonnet's checkered past.
The elder Miss Eubanks decried the mannishness of cane-bearing; and Mrs. Westley Keyts, entering the shop as Miss Caroline was bowed out, declared that her silk stockings were of a hue hardly respectable, and that she wore shoes "twice too small for her."
The eyes of the suddenly urbane Westley glistened when he overheard this, but he fell to dissecting a beef without further sign.
