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Updated: June 21, 2025
This was in the morning, and the afternoon train had carried Mrs. Dr. Van Buren to Chicopee, where Ethelyn's glowing face flashed a bright welcome when she came, but was white and pallid as the face of a corpse when the voluminous skirts of Mrs. Van Buren's poplin dress passed through the gate next day and disappeared in the direction of the depot.
Had she stayed away Richard might have yielded, for he was frightened at the storm he had invoked; but Richard was passive in his mother's hands, and listened complacently while in stronger, plainer language than he had used she repeated in substance all he had said about the impropriety of Ethelyn's mingling with the gay throng at Washington. Immodesty, Mrs.
Ethelyn looked ridickerlous, showing her shoulderblades, with that sharp point running down her back, and her skirts moppin' the floor for half a yard behind." Any superfluity of length in Ethelyn's skirts was more than counterbalanced by Mrs. Markham's, who this night wore the heavy black silk which her sister-in-law had matched in Boston ten years before.
F himself had been up to see that all was comfortable, and Miss Clark had ordered a better set of springs, with a new hair mattress, and somebody had put a bouquet of flowers in the room and hung a muslin curtain at the window. "A big-bug, most likely," Mrs. Peter Pry said, when, after her pack, she brought her knitting for a few moments into Ethelyn's room and wondered who the man could be.
As she had worked for him, so she now worked for Ethelyn, approaching Richard very adroitly and managing so skillfully that when at last, on the occasion of her visit to his mother's, Aunt Barbara asked him, in her presence and Ethelyn's, if he had never thought it would be well both for himself and wife to live somewhere else than there at home, he never dreamed that he was echoing the very ideas Melinda had instilled into his mind by promptly replying that "he had recently thought seriously of a change," and then asked Ethie where she would like to live in Olney or in Camden.
At Saratoga, where they met many of her acquaintances, all of whom were anxious to see the fastidious Ethelyn's husband, it seemed to her that he was more remiss than ever in those little things which make up the finished gentleman, while his peculiar expressions sometimes made every nerve quiver with pain.
The waffles and the gingerbread were all they had promised to be, and the supper passed off quietly, with the exception of a mishap of poor, awkward Andy, who tipped his plate of hot cakes and honey into his lap, and then in his sudden spring backward, threw a part of the plate's contents upon Ethelyn's shining silk.
Eunice Plympton was a respectable, trusty girl, and he believed in doing well for those who did well for him; but that was no time to argue the point, and so he sat still and listened to Ethelyn's complaint that Eunice had called him Richard, and would undoubtedly on the morrow address her as Ethelyn.
Melinda, too, had her little ambitions, her silent hopes and aspirations, and even her vague longings for a winter in Washington, As the Markham house and the Jones house were distant from each other only half a mile, she was a frequent visitor of Richard's mother, always assisting when there was more work than usual on hand and on the occasion of Richard's first going to Washington ironing his shirts and packing them herself in the square hair trunk which had called forth Ethelyn's ire.
"She is married, it would seem," she said to Hannah, and then, as Richard's name dropped from Ethelyn's lips, she looked curiously at the flushed face so ghastly white, save where spots of crimson colored the cheeks, and at the mass of hair which Ethie had pushed up and off from the forehead it seemed to oppress with its weight. "Go, bring me some ice-water from the cellar," Mrs.
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