Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities,
or cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and
living only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything
that made it respect able, so that they looked for all the world
like so many old daguerreotypes pulled from the frames. Not so
Miss Felicia Grayson of Geneseo, New York. Her past was a
flexible, india-rubber kind of a past that she stretched out after
her. She might still wear her hair as she did when the old General
raved over her, although the frost of many winters had touched it;
but she would never hold on to the sleeves of those days or the
skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go, be puffed, cut
bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day insisted. Oh!
a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame
Felicia!
With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his
seat from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see
everybody who got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked
past and gazed up at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps
and railings.
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