Mrs. Duds Sister

Mrs. Dud's Sister, by Josephine
Daskam

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Title: Mrs. Dud's Sister
Author: Josephine Daskam
Release Date: November 6, 2007 [EBook #23369]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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DUD'S SISTER ***

Produced by David Widger

MRS. DUD'S SISTER
By Josephine Daskam
Copyright, 1903, by Charles Scribner's Sons

They were having tea on the terrace. As Varian strolled up to the group
he wished that Hunter could see the picture they made--Hunter, who
had not been in America for thirty years, and who had been so honestly
surprised when Varian had spoken of Mrs. Dud's pretty maids--she
always had pretty ones, even to the cook's third assistant.
"Maids? Maids? It used to be 'help,'" he had protested. "You don't mean
to say they have waitresses in Binghamville now?"
Varian had despaired of giving him any idea.
"Come over and see Mrs. Dud," he had urged, "and do her portrait.
We've moved on since you left us, you know. She's a wonder--she
really is. When you remember how she used to carry her father's dinner
to the store Saturday afternoons--"
"And now I suppose she sports real Mechlin on her cap," assented
Hunter, anxious to show how perfectly he caught the situation.
Varian had roared helplessly. "Cap? Cap!" he had moaned finally. "Oh,
my sainted granny! Cap! My poor fellow, your view of Binghamville
must be like the old maps of Africa in the green geography, that said
'desert' and 'interior' and 'savage tribes' from time to time. I should like
awfully to see Mrs. Dud in a cap."
Hunter had looked puzzled.
"But, dear me! she might very well wear one, I should think," he had
murmured defensively. "I don't wish to be invidious, but surely Lizzie
must be--let's see; 'eighty, 'ninety--why, she must be between forty-five
and fifty now."
Varian had waved his hand dramatically. "Nobody considers Mrs. Dud
and time in the same breath. If you could see her in her golf rig! Or on
a horse! She even sheds a lustre on the rest of us. I forget my
rheumatism!"
But Hunter, retreating behind his determination to avoid a second

seasickness--it might have been sincere; nobody ever knew--had stayed
in Florence, and Varian had been obliged to come without him to the
house-party.
On a straw cushion, a cup in her strong white hand, a bunch of adoring
young girls at her feet, sat Mrs. Dud. Rosy and firm-cheeked, crisp in
stiff white duck, deliriously contrasted with her fluffy Parisian parasol,
she scorned the softening ruffles of her presumable contemporaries; her
delicately squared chin, for the most part held high, showed a straight
white collar under a throat only a little fuller than the girlish ones all
around her.
Old Dudley himself strolled about the group, gossiping here and there
with some pretty woman, sending the grave servants from one to
another with some particularly desirable sandwich, "rubbing it in," as
he said to the men who had failed to touch his score on the links,
tantalizingly uncertain as to which one of the young women he would
invite to lead the cotillon with him at the club dance that week: none of
the young men could take his place at that, as they themselves
enviously admitted.
What a well-matched couple it was! What a lot they got out of life!
Varian walked quietly by the group, to enjoy better the pretty, modish
picture they made. Their quick chatter, their bursts of laughter, the
sweet faint odor of the tea, the gay dresses and light flannels, with the
quiet, sombrely attired servants to add tone, all gave him, fresh from
Hunter's quick sense of the effective, an appreciation that gained force
from his separateness; he walked farther away to get a different point of
view.
He was out of any path now, and suddenly, hardly beyond reach of
their voices, he found himself in a part of the grounds he had never
approached before. A thick high hedge shut in a kind of court at the
side and back of the great house, and a solid wooden door, carefully
matched to its green, left open by accident, showed a picture so out of
line with the succession of vivid scenes that dazzled the visitor at
Wilton Bluffs that he stopped involuntarily. The rectangle was carpeted
with the characteristic emerald turf of the place, divided by intersecting

red brick paths into four regular squares. In the farther corner