"My mother's door is jammed. Please come right away."
"Yes, miss." He knocked his pipe against the wall and ground out the
life of the coal with his slippered heel. "Just what happened to your
grandmother in the 'quake of sixty-eight. I mind the time I had getting her
out."
IV
It was quite half an hour before the door yielded to the combined efforts
of James and the gardener-coachman, and during the interval Mrs. Groome
recovered her poise and made her morning toilette.
She had taken her iron-gray hair from its pins and patted the narrow row of
frizzes into place; the flat side bands, the concise coil of hair on top
were as severely disdainful of untoward circumstance or passing fashion as
they had been any morning these forty years or more.
She wore old-fashioned corsets and was abdominally correct for her years; a
long gown of black voile with white polka dots, and a guimpe of white net
whose raff of chiffon somewhat disguised the wreck of her throat. On her
shoulders, disposed to rheumatism, she wore a tippet of brown marabout
feathers, and in her ears long jet earrings.
She had the dark brown eyes of the Ballingers, but they were bleared at
the rims, and on the downward slope of her fine aquiline nose she wore
spectacles that looked as if mounted in cast iron. Altogether an imposing
relic; and "that built-up look" as Aileen expressed it, was the only one
that would have suited her mental style.
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