When the first dresses which had been ordered for her came home, she was
delighted as any girl must have been, for they were the richest and most
beautiful fabrics that money could buy; but Miss Ludington seemed, of the
two, far the more pleased.
For herself she had cared nothing for dress. In forty years she had not
given a thought to personal adornment, but Ida's toilet became her most
absorbing preoccupation. On her account she became a close student of the
fashion-papers, and but for the girl's protests would have bought her a
new dress at least every day.
She would have liked Ida to change her costume a dozen times between
morning and evening, and asked no better than to serve as her
dressing-maid. To brush and braid her shining hair, stealthily kissing it
the while; to array her in sheeny satins and airy muslins; to hang jewels
upon her neck, and clasp bracelets upon her wrists, and to admire and
caress the completed work of her hands, constituted an occupation which
she would have liked to make perpetual.
When Miss Ludington's mother had died she had left to her daughter, then
a young girl, all her jewels, including a rather flue set of diamonds.
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