t
of person with a clear profile like that of a cold, old little bird.
Her small, sharp nose resembled a beak; her eyes were like two black
beads; and her conversation was a lengthy series of twitterings.
Charlotte Clifford used to tell Miss Winthrop that if Mrs. Valentine
had been a canary, people would have forever been putting a towel over
her cage to secure silence. She was always idle, save for a
bewildering succession of reconstruction periods, apparently
forestalling ruins that no one else could have prophesied. She dieted
and reduced her hips; had violet rays applied to her scalp; had her
wrinkles ironed out by some mysterious process. If you caught her
before ten in the morning you would find her with crescent-shaped bits
of court-plaster beside her eyes, in front of her ears, and between
her brows. She was beautifully clothed, shod, gloved, massaged,
manicured, and marcelled. She lived on the best sides of the streets
and at the proper hotels. She answered notes, returned calls, and gave
wedding presents punctiliously. She never used the telephone for
invitations, nor had anything but contempt for abbreviations,
carefully writing out Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Minneapolis,
Minnesota, when she addressed her sisters in those cities. A mass of
the most glaring virtues was Mrs. Reginald Valentine, impeccable and
unassailable, with views on all subjects as rigid as the laws of the
Medes and Persians. She had ordered her husband's life during their
ten years of marriage, he being a gentle and artistic soul, and she
had more or less directed his exercise, amusements, diet, as well as
his political and religious opinions. She nursed him faithfully in his
last illness, but when he timidly begged to be cremated instead of
buried, she reminded him that it was a radical, ultra-modern idea;
that the Valentine lot and monument were very beautiful; that there
never had been any cremations in the family connection; and that she
hoped he would not break a long-established custom and leave behind
him a positively irreligious request. Various stories of Mr.
Valentine's docility had crept into circulation, and it is said that
on this occasion he turned his head meekly to the wall and sighed:
"Very well, Emma! Do just as you think best; it's your funeral!"

Just how Dorothea blossomed on this stalk it is difficult to say. A
bright-eyed, sunshiny, willful baby, she had grown into an unaffected,
attractive, breezy young woman,