When Maria Abbott finally succumbed she assured herself that curiosity to
see the more ambushed glitter of that meretricious faubourg had nothing
to do with it; it was easy to persuade herself that she hoped, being an
indisputably smart woman herself, gradually to impose her simpler and more
appropriate standards upon these people who sorely threatened the continued
dominance of the old regime.
Mrs. Hunter soon disabused her of any such notion, and during the early
days of their acquaintance, after Mrs. Abbott came to one of her luncheons
attired in a pique skirt and severe shirtwaist, impeccably cut and worn,
but entirely out of place in an Italian palace, where forty fashionable
women, some of whom had motored sixty miles to attend the function, were
dressed as they would be at a Newport luncheon, Mrs. Hunter attended the
next solemn affair at Rincona so overdressed and made up that the outraged
Altarinos (as Alexina irreverently called them) were reduced to a horrified
silence that was almost hysterical.
But one morning Mrs. Abbott caught Mrs. Hunter digging in her private
vegetable garden behind the palace, and wearing a garment that her second
gardener's wife would have scorned, her unblemished face beaming under a
battered straw hat. Both women had the humor to laugh, and their intimacy
dated from that moment, Mrs. Hunter confessing that stuff on her face made
her sick; but adding that she adored dress and thought that any rich woman
was a fool who didn't.
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