dress, conduct,
mode of living she was as an intelligent and modern woman of sixty
should be. The youth of her was in that intangible thing called,
sentimentally, the spirit. It had survived forty years of buffeting, and
disappointment, and sacrifice and hard work. Inside this woman who wore
well-tailored black and small close hats and clean white wash gloves
(even in Chicago) was the girl, Hannah Winter, still curious about this
adventure known as living; still capable of bearing its disappointments
or enjoying its surprises. Still capable, even, of being surprised. And
all this is often the case, all unsuspected by the Marcias until the
Marcias are, themselves, suddenly sixty. When it is too late to say to
the Hannah Winters, "Now I understand."

We know that Hannah Winter had been married in wine-coloured silk, very
stiff and grand. So stiff and rich that the dress would have stood alone
if Hannah had ever thought of subjecting her wedding gown to such
indignity. It was the sort of silk of which it is said that they don't
make such silk now. It was cut square at the neck and trimmed with
passementerie and fringe brought crosswise from breast to skirt hem.
It's in the old photograph and, curiously enough, while Marcia thinks
it's comic, Joan, her nine-year-old daughter, agrees with her
grandmother in thinking it very lovely. And so, in its quaintness and
stiffness and bravery, it is. Only you've got to have imagination.

While wine-coloured silk wouldn't have done for a church wedding it was
quite all right at home; and Hannah Winter's had been a home wedding
(the Winters lived in one of the old three-story red-bricks that may
still be seen, in crumbling desuetude, over on Rush Street) so that
wine-coloured silk for a twenty-year-old bride was quite in the mode.

It is misleading, perhaps, to go on calling her Hannah Winter, for she
married Hermie Slocum and became, according to law, Mrs. Hermie Slocum,
but remained, somehow, Hannah Winter in spite of law and clergy, though
with no such intent on her part. She had never even heard of Lucy Stone.
It wasn't merely that her Chicago girlhood friends still spoke of her as
Hannah Winter. Hannah Winter suited her--belonged to her and was
characteristic. Mrs. Hermie Slocum sort of melted and ran down off her.
Hermie was the sort of man who, christened Herman, is called Hermie.
That all those who had known her before her marriage still spoke of her
as Hannah Winter forty yea