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Nevertheless, in writing to Mr. Madeline received Miss Wimple's extraordinary good news with the silence of one bewildered.
At last, at the Splurge house one evening, in the presence of Adelaide and Simon, he was betrayed by his egotism into boasting, by insinuation, of certain successes at the Circulating Library most damaging to Miss Wimple's reputation for understanding and good taste; he was "in her books," he said. An accordant glance passed between Adelaide and Simon.
But Hank, shaking in every joint and muscle of his still flabby body, wagged his head in utter misery. "Billy, I'll do anything else for you and Mrs. Evans and little Billy anything but that. I'll jump into Wimple's pond, get drunk, sign the pledge anything but that. What you're a-wanting, Billy, ain't to be thought of. You're forgetting, Billy, what I was and what I am.
She sat up late that night, engaged in compromising with her prejudices, by drawing out the whalebones, one by one, from the "Alboni," shaving them down with a piece of glass, very thin, and tucking them, until all their loud defiance was subdued, and for Miss Wimple's Hoop it might be tenderly deprecated that it was nothing to speak of, "such a leetle one."
To the young man and the ripening maiden, then, their love came as naturally as violets and clover-blooms, and was as little likely to take their parents or the familiar country-folk by surprise. When Simon took trips to New York, he "stopped" at Mr. Wimple's, and Sally's summer home in Hendrik was always "Aunt Phoebe's," as she had been taught to call Simon's mother.
We admire a large room that is painted, and ornamented, and gilded; but what is there in all these things to be compared with the sight of these luminous bodies that adorn every part of the sky? Tommy. That's true, indeed. My Lord Wimple's great room that I have heard all the people admire so much, is no more to be compared to it than the shabbiest thing in the world. Mr Barlow.
All Hendrik spoke of the demure heroine of the skimped delaine as "Little Miss Wimple"; and Madeline, though the youngest of the sisters, was universally known as "Miss Splurge," as it were, awfully. Yet Miss Wimple and Madeline were almost exactly "of a size," by any measurement, and Miss Wimple's clothes were a sweet fit for Madeline; the petticoat experiment had discovered that.
She thought she understood Miss Wimple's Hoop, because she had not discovered the poetry in Miss Wimple's quilted petticoat. They had not spoken of those things again. Delicacy was the law for those two; and to do their best, and thankfully, bravely, accept the first deliverance Heaven might send them, was their religion.
But, however the probabilities may appear, Miss Wimple's Hoop was a shaved-whalebone fact; and the quilted petticoat would never have been missed, but for the officious scrutiny of the eyes, and the provoking prating of the tongues, of a sophisticated few who marvelled greatly at the pliancy and the "perfect set" of Miss Wimple's Alboni, "and that demure little prig, too! who'd have thought it?"
Only Adelaide broke the silence; with her gaze fixed full on Withers, and a triumphant sneer crowning her happy lips, she uttered one word by way of chorus, "Joseph!" At that word a faint flush flitted athwart the cheeks of Madeline, and she moved as if uneasy; but she did not speak again, nor turn her eyes to any face but Miss Wimple's.
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