certain
epoch, partly from economy, partly from a certain sense of injury.
She had said to herself that she was old, she had been passed by; she
would dress as one who had. Now her sentiments underwent a curious
change. The possibility occurred to her that Harry might ask her to
take her departed sister's place. She was older than that sister,
much older than he, but she looked in her glass and suddenly her
passed youth seemed to look forth upon her. The revival of hopes
sometimes serves as a tonic. Aunt Maria actually did look younger
than she had done, even with her scanty frizzes. She regarded other
women, not older than herself, with pompadours, and aspiration seized
her.

One day she went to New York shopping. She secretly regarded that as
an expedition. She was terrified at the crossings. Stout, elderly
woman as she was, when she found herself in the whirl of the great
city, she became as a small, scared kitten. She gathered up her
skirts, and fled incontinently across the streets, with policemen
looking after her with haughty disapprobation. But when she was told
to step lively on the trolley-cars, her true self asserted its
endurance. "I am not going to step in front of a team for you or any
other person," she told one conductor, and she spoke with such
emphasis that even he was intimidated, and held the car meekly until
the team had passed. When Aunt Maria came home from New York that
particular afternoon, she had an expression at once of defiance and
embarrassment, which both Maria and her father noticed.

"Well, what did you see in New York, Maria?" asked Harry, pleasantly.

"I saw the greatest lot of folks without manners, that I ever saw in
my whole life," replied Aunt Maria, sharply.

Harry Edgham laughed. "You'll get used to it," he said, easily.
"Everybody who comes from New England has to take time to like New
York. It is an acquired taste."

"When I do acquire it, I'll be equal to any of them," replied Aunt
Maria. "When I lose my temper, they had better look out."

Harry Edgham laughed again.

It was the next morning when Aunt Maria appeared at the early
breakfast with a pompadour. Her thin frizzes were carefully puffed
over a mystery which she had purchased the afternoon before.

Maria, when she first saw her aunt, stared open-mouthed; then she ate
her breakfast as if she had seen nothing.

Harry Edgham gave one sharp stare at his sister-in-law, then he said:
"Got your hair done up a new