The Other Girls | Page 8

or Nahant.
Did you ever contrast one of these trains--when perhaps you were such
traveller or excursionist--with the after, leisurely, comfortable one at
ten or eleven; when gentlemen who only need to be in the city through
banking hours, and ladies bent on calls or elegant shopping, come

chatting and rustling to their seats, and hold a little drawing-room
exchange in the twenty-five minutes' trip?
If you have,--and if you have a little sympathetic imagination that fills
out hints,--you have had a glimpse of some of these "other girls" and
the thing that daily living is to them, with which my story means to
concern itself.
Have you noticed the hats, with the rose or the feather behind or at top,
scrupulously according to the same dictate of style that rules alike for
seven and ten o'clock, but which has often to be worn through wet and
dry till the rose has been washed by too many a shower, and the feather
blown by too many a dusty wind, to stand for anything but a sign that
she knows what should be where, if she only had it to put there? Have
you seen the cheap alpacas, in two shades, sure to fade in different
ways and out of kindred with each other, painfully looped in creasing
folds, very much sat upon, but which would not by any means resign
themselves to simple smoothed straightness, while silks were hitched
and crisp Hernanis puffed?
Yet the alpacas, and all their innumerable cousinhood, have also their
first mornings of fresh gloss, when the newness of the counter is still
upon them; there is a youth for all things; a first time, a charm that
seems as if it might last, though we know it neither will nor was meant
to; if it would, or were, the counters might be taken down. And people
who wear gowns that are creased and faded, have each, one at a time,
their days of glory, when they begin again. The farther apart they come,
perhaps the more of the spring-time there is in them.
Marion Kent bloomed out this clear, sweet, clean summer morning in a
span new tea-colored zephyrine polonaise with three little frills edged
with tiny brown braid, which set it off trimly with the due contrasting
depth of color, and cost nearly nothing except the stitches and the
kerosene she burned late in the hot July nights in her only time for
finishing it. She had covered her little old curled leaf of a hat with a
tea-colored corner that had been left, and puffed it up high and light to
the point of the new style, with brown veil tissue that also floated off in
an abundant cloudy grace behind; and she had such an air of breezy and

ecstatic elegance as she came beaming and hastening into the early car,
that nobody really looked down to see that the underskirt was the
identical black brilliantine that had done service all the spring in the
dismal mornings of waterproofs and india-rubbers and general damp
woolen smells and blue nips and shivers.
Marion Kent always made you think of things that never at all belonged
to her. She gave you an impression of something that she seemed to
stand for, which she could not wholly be. Her zephyrine, with its silky
shine, hinted at the real lustres of far more costly fabrics; her hat,
perked up with puffs of grenadine (how all these things do rhyme and
repeat their little Frenchy tags of endings!) put you in mind of lace and
feathers, and a general float and flutter of gay millinery; her step and
expression, as she came airily into this second-rate old car, put on for
the "journeymen" train, brought up a notion, almost, of some ball-room
advent, flushed and conscious and glad with the turning of all admiring
eyes upon it; her face, even, without being absolutely beautiful,
sparkled out at you a certain will and force and intent of beauty that
shot an idea or suggestion of brilliant prettiness instantly through your
unresisting imagination, compelling you to fill out whatever was
wanting; and what more, can you explain, do feature and bearing that
come nearest to perfect fulfillment effect?
The middle-aged cabinet-maker looked over his newspaper at her as
she came in; he had little daughters of his own growing up to girlhood,
and there might have been some thought in his head not purely
admiring; but still he looked up. The knot of office-boys, crowding and
skylarking across a couple of seats, stopped their shuffle and noise for a
second, and one said, "My! ain't she stunning?" A young fellow, rather
spruce in his own way also, with precise necktie, deep paper cuffs and
dollar-store studs and initial sleeve-buttons, touched his