However, they sat outwardly meek under the yoke; nearly all of
them seeking a quiet solace of tobacco--not that they smoked; Heaven and
the gallantry of Carlow County forbid--nor were there anywhere visible
tokens of the comforting ministrations of nicotine to violate the eye of
etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.
Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the room.
Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the aisle to the
platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a cordial eye and a
handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was bent and trembled
slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high brow, deeply lined,
the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white beard that covered his
chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young women was tall and had
the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father, who preceded her. The
other was the strange lady.
A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a
pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs. Columbus
Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a lady
in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so much
she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got a kind
of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so,
somehow, too.
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