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She smiled around from the foot of her curving class, and never had her lessons, but she never disobeyed the rules, except that of punctuality. Floretta was late at school. She came daintily up the aisle, two cheap bangles on one wrist slipping over a slim hand, and tinkling. Floretta's mother had a taste for the cheaply decorative.
But Floretta's heart was set upon "Wilfred," her favorite hero of romance being Wilfred of Ivanhoe. The story is that the parents being no nearer an agreement on the great question, Floretta made a proposal of compromise.
The antique toga left quite disengaged a bare arm, that now seemed as powerful as it was beautiful: it rose and fell like the piston of a modern steam-engine, and heavy slaps resounded one after another on Floretta's shoulders; the last one drove her sobbing and screaming through the curtain, and there she was heard crying bitterly for some time after.
That night, amid much wonder and tender ridicule, Ellen told her mother and Aunt Eva, and her father, that Ben Simonds was Floretta's beau, and Granville Joy was hers. But Andrew laughed doubtfully.
Some of us antiques, then tow-headed little shavers in the front seats, can still remember Miss Floretta's rendition of the lines: "And Saxon I am Roderick Dhu!" The extremely genteel, not to say ladylike, elocution of the Highland chief and the indescribable rising inflection and emphasis on the "I."
"I'm going to walk across the fields to Chericoke," she said, "and Hosea is to bring the carriage for me about sunset. We must have some white silk to make those flags out of, and there isn't a bit in the house." She went out, stepping slowly in her wide skirts and holding the pitcher carefully before her. Floretta's baby was sleeping, and after a few pleasant words the girl kept on to Chericoke.
There was an abundance of coarse lace on Floretta's frock, and she wore a superfluous sash which was not too fresh. Floretta toed out excessively, her slender little feet pointing out sharply, almost at right angles with each other, and Ellen admired her for that.
Ellen opened the box, and gazed at her watch and chain; then she glanced at her father and mother down in the audience, and the three loving souls seemed to meet in an ineffable solitude in the midst of the crowd. All three faces were pale Ellen's began to quiver. She felt Floretta's shoulder warm through her thin sleeve against hers. "My! you've got one I said so," she whispered.
Ambler and the two old ladies. "It makes no difference what I eat," she would assure protesting Mammy Riah. "I am so strong, you see, and besides I really like Aunt Floretta's ashcakes."
Then Floretta's remark repeated itself mechanically. "We have to do some tall scheming to keep them apart." Was Stella here, after all? Mrs. Warrington was not a bad looking woman and in fact it was difficult to see how she expected to be improved by cosmetics that would lighten her complexion, bleaches that would flaxen her hair, tortures for this, that, and the other defect, real or imagined.
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