Datasets:
edwindvinas
/
testdataset

Dataset card Data Studio Files
xet
 Community
text
stringlengths
0
72
beribboned and belaced nightgown.
She passed the house on Elm Street twice—Valancy never even thought
about it as “home”—but saw no one. No doubt her mother was sitting in
the room this lovely June evening playing solitaire—and cheating.
Valancy knew that Mrs. Frederick always cheated. She never lost a game.
Most of the people Valancy met looked at her seriously and passed her
with a cool nod. Nobody stopped to speak to her.
Valancy put on her green dress when she got home. Then she took it off
again. She felt so miserably undressed in its low neck and short
sleeves. And that low, crimson girdle around the hips seemed positively
indecent. She hung it up in the closet, feeling flatly that she had
wasted her money. She would never have the courage to wear that dress.
John Foster’s arraignment of fear had no power to stiffen her against
this. In this one thing habit and custom were still all-powerful. Yet
she sighed as she went down to meet Barney Snaith in her old
snuff-brown silk. That green thing had been very becoming—she had seen
so much in her one ashamed glance. Above it her eyes had looked like
odd brown jewels and the girdle had given her flat figure an entirely
different appearance. She wished she could have left it on. But there
were some things John Foster did not know.
Every Sunday evening Valancy went to the little Free Methodist church
in a valley on the edge of “up back”—a spireless little grey building
among the pines, with a few sunken graves and mossy gravestones in the
small, paling-encircled, grass-grown square beside it. She liked the
minister who preached there. He was so simple and sincere. An old man,
who lived in Port Lawrence and came out by the lake in a little
disappearing propeller boat to give a free service to the people of the
small, stony farms back of the hills, who would otherwise never have
heard any gospel message. She liked the simple service and the fervent
singing. She liked to sit by the open window and look out into the pine
woods. The congregation was always small. The Free Methodists were few
in number, poor and generally illiterate. But Valancy loved those
Sunday evenings. For the first time in her life she liked going to
church. The rumour reached Deerwood that she had “turned Free
Methodist” and sent Mrs. Frederick to bed for a day. But Valancy had
not turned anything. She went to the church because she liked it and
because in some inexplicable way it did her good. Old Mr. Towers
believed exactly what he preached and somehow it made a tremendous
difference.
Oddly enough, Roaring Abel disapproved of her going to the hill church
as strongly as Mrs. Frederick herself could have done. He had “no use
for Free Methodists. He was a Presbyterian.” But Valancy went in spite
of him.
“We’ll hear something worse than _that_ about her soon,” Uncle Benjamin
predicted gloomily.
They did.
Valancy could not quite explain, even to herself, just why she wanted
to go to that party. It was a dance “up back” at Chidley Corners; and
dances at Chidley Corners were not, as a rule, the sort of assemblies
where well-brought-up young ladies were found. Valancy knew it was
coming off, for Roaring Abel had been engaged as one of the fiddlers.
But the idea of going had never occurred to her until Roaring Abel
himself broached it at supper.
“You come with me to the dance,” he ordered. “It’ll do you good—put
some colour in your face. You look peaked—you want something to liven
you up.”
Valancy found herself suddenly wanting to go. She knew nothing at all
of what dances at Chidley Corners were apt to be like. Her idea of
dances had been fashioned on the correct affairs that went by that name
in Deerwood and Port Lawrence. Of course she knew the Corners’ dance
wouldn’t be just like them. Much more informal, of course. But so much
the more interesting. Why shouldn’t she go? Cissy was in a week of
apparent health and improvement. She wouldn’t mind staying alone in the
least. She entreated Valancy to go if she wanted to. And Valancy _did_
want to go.
She went to her room to dress. A rage against the snuff-brown silk
seized her. Wear that to a party! Never. She pulled her green crêpe
from its hanger and put it on feverishly. It was nonsense to feel
so—so—naked—just because her neck and arms were bare. That was just her
old maidishness. She would not be ridden by it. On went the dress—the
slippers.
It was the first time she had worn a pretty dress since the organdies
of her early teens. And _they_ had never made her look like this.
If she only had a necklace or something. She wouldn’t feel so bare
then. She ran down to the garden. There were clovers there—great
crimson things growing in the long grass. Valancy gathered handfuls of
them and strung them on a cord. Fastened above her neck they gave her
the comfortable sensation of a collar and were oddly becoming. Another
circlet of them went round her hair, dressed in the low puffs that
became her. Excitement brought those faint pink stains to her face. She
flung on her coat and pulled the little, twisty hat over her hair.
“You look so nice and—and—different, dear,” said Cissy. “Like a green
moonbeam with a gleam of red in it, if there could be such a thing.”
Valancy stooped to kiss her.