have affected me more nobly, I should in justice
add, when old Mrs. L. passed or hovered, for she sometimes caustically
joined the circle and sometimes, during the highest temperatures, which
were very high that summer, but flitted across it in a single flowing
garment, as we amazedly conceived; one of the signs of that grand
impertinence, I supposed, which belonged to "dowagers"--dowagers who
were recognised characters and free speakers, doing and saying what they
liked. This ancient lady was lodged in some outlying tract of the
many-roomed house, which in more than one quarter stretched away into
mystery; but the piazza, to which she had access, was unbroken, and
whenever she strayed from her own territory she swam afresh into ours. I
definitely remember that, having heard and perhaps read of dowagers,
who, as I was aware, had scarce been provided for in our social scheme,
I said to myself at first sight of our emphatic neighbour, a person
clearly used to exceptional deference, "This must be a perfect
specimen;" which was somehow very wonderful. The absolute first sight,
however, had preceded the New Brighton summer, and it makes me lose
myself in a queer dim vision, all the obscurities attendant on my having
been present, as a very small boy indeed, at an evening entertainment
where Mrs. L. figured in an attire that is still vivid to me: a blue
satin gown, a long black lace shawl and a head-dress consisting in
equally striking parts of a brown wig, a plume of some sort waving over
it and a band or fillet, whether of some precious metal or not I forget,
keeping it in place by the aid of a precious stone which adorned the
centre of her brow. Such was my first view of the _feronniere_ of our
grandmothers, when not of our greatgrandmothers. I see its wearer at
this day bend that burdened brow upon me in a manner sufficiently awful,
while her knuckly white gloves toyed with a large fan and a vinaigrette
attached to her thumb by a chain; and as she was known to us afterwards
for a friend of my Albany grandmother's it may have been as a tribute to
this tie that she allowed me momentarily to engage her attention. _Then_
it predominantly must have been that I knew her for a dowager--though
this was a light in which I had never considered my grandmother herself;
but what I have quite lost the clue to is the question of my
extraordinary footing in such an assembly, the occasion of a dance of my
elders, youthful elders but young m