You felt it in the color and length of her gloves; the size of her pearl ear rings (not too large, and yet not too small), in the choice of the few rings that encircled her slender and now somewhat shrunken fingers (one hoop of gold had a history that the old French Ambassador could have told if he wanted to, so Peter once hinted to me)--everything she did in fact betrayed a wide acquaintance with the great world and its requirements and exactions.
Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities, or cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and living only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything that made it respect able, so that they looked for all the world like so many old daguerreotypes pulled from the frames.

Not so Miss Felicia Grayson of Geneseo, New York.

Her past was a flexible, india-rubber kind of a past that she stretched out after her.

She might still wear her hair as she did when the old General raved over her, although the frost of many winters had touched it; but she would never hold on to the sleeves of those days or the skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go, be puffed, cut bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day insisted.

Oh! a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame Felicia! With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his seat from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see everybody who got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked past and gazed up at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps and railings.