[Snow-Bound at Eagle’s by Bret Harte]@TWC D-Link bookSnow-Bound at Eagle’s CHAPTER VII 2/26
She had not only discarded her white dress as a concession to the practical evidence of the surrounding winter, but she had also brought out a feather hat and sable muff which had once graced a fashionable suburb of Boston.
Even Falkner had exchanged his slouch hat and picturesque serape for a beaver overcoat and fur cap of Hale's which had been pressed upon him by Kate, under the excuse of the exigencies of the season.
Within a stone's throw of the thicket, turbulent with the savage forces of nature, they walked with the abstraction of people hearing only their own voices; in the face of the solemn peaks clothed with white austerity they talked gravely of dress. "I don't mean to say," said Kate demurely, "that you're to give up the serape entirely; you can wear it on rainy nights and when you ride over here from your friend's house to spend the evening--for the sake of old times," she added, with an unconscious air of referring to an already antiquated friendship; "but you must admit it's a little too gorgeous and theatrical for the sunlight of day and the public highway." "But why should that make it wrong, if the experience of a people has shown it to be a garment best fitted for their wants and requirements ?" said Falkner argumentatively. "But you are not one of those people," said Kate, "and that makes all the difference.
You look differently and act differently, so that there is something irreconcilable between your clothes and you that makes you look odd." "And to look odd, according to your civilized prejudices, is to be wrong," said Falkner bitterly. "It is to seem different from what one really is--which IS wrong.
Now, you are a mining superintendent, you tell me.
<<Back Index Next>> D-Link book Top TWC mobile books
|