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The surrey and the rusty white horse were smothered in sulphurous dust. It seemed odd to Martie that Henny was driving Mrs. Prout into town with an air of actual importance; Henny was clean, and the old lady had on cotton gloves and a stiff gray percale. Yet they were only going to hot little Monroe. Martie was going to New York! All her life she remembered the novelty and delight of the trip.
When a mother, who ought to be most interested in training her children for usefulness and heaven, gives her chief time to fixing up her back hair, and is worried to death because the curls she bought are not of the same shade as the sparsely-settled locks of her own raising; and culturing the dromedarian hump of dry-goods on her back till, as she comes into church, a good old elder bursts into laughter behind his pocket-handkerchief, making the merriment sound as much like a sneeze as possible; her waking moments employed with discussions about polonaise, and vert-de-gris velvets, and ecru percale, and fringed guipure, and poufs, and sashes, and rose-de-chêne silks, and scalloped flounces; her happiness in being admired at balls and parties and receptions, you may know that she has thrown off the care of her children, that they are looking after themselves, that they are being brought up by machinery instead of loving hands in a word, that there is in her home a "patented self-rocker!"
What difference would it make to us whether we had only one white percale gown, if the man we love did not see other women dressed differently, more elegantly than we women who inspire ideas by their ways, by a multitude of little things which really go to make up great passions?
She would buy so and so many yards of percale for new shirt waists for the boys and Janie and Mag. She had intended to make the old ones do by skilful patching. Mag should have another gown. She had seen some beautiful patterns, veritable bargains in the shop windows. And still there would be left enough for new stockings two pairs apiece and what darning that would save for a while!
She dressed herself in a worn shirt-waist of dotted blue percale, a skirt of light- brown serge rather faded, and a small straw hat which she had worn all summer at Columbia City. Her shoes were old, and her necktie was in that crumpled, flattened state which time and much wearing impart. She made a very average looking shop-girl with the exception of her features.
"I shopped it for you." "You, too you're in linen, Hester?" "A percale shirt waist. I shopped it for you, too." "Give me your hand," he said, and pressed a string of close kisses into its palm. The simplicity of the outrageous subterfuge amazed even her. She held hothouse grapes at two dollars a pound to his lips, and he ate them through a smile. "Naughty, extravagant girl!" he said.
"Off with these garments of state and royal robes," said Marie Antoinette, gliding out of the stiff apparel, and standing in a light, white undergarment, with bare shoulders and arms. "Give me a white percale dress and a gauze mantle with it." "Will your majesty appear again in this simple costume?" asked Madame de Campan, sighing.
Picking his way gingerly through the chickens and puppies and cats and children, the last now smitten into astonished silence by his appearance, he knocked on the door. The woman who came to answer him was dressed in what had been a black and purple percale, wrapper, she had a baby on her arm, and was making vain attempts to fasten up a great coil of hair at the back of her head.
He was bare-headed and bare-footed, and wore a worn pair of velvet trousers and a percale blouse torn at the neck, showing his sharp and angular bones covered with brown skin. His touseled black hair, streaked with gray, and his sharp visage, resembling a bird of prey's, all rumpled, indicated that he had just awakened.
Margaret had a distinct impression that not a movable article therein was in place, and not an available inch of tables or chairs unused, before her eyes reached the tall figure of the woman in a gown of chocolate percale, who was frying cutlets at the big littered range. Her face was dark with heat, and streaked with perspiration. She turned as Margaret entered, and gave a delighted cry.
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