They had waited, indeed, quite forty years to buy this one.
The women of the Heath family had always possessed a black silk gown. It
was a sort of outward symbol of inward respectability--an unfailing
indicator of their proud position as members of one of the old families.
It might be donned at any time after one's twenty-first birthday, and it
should be donned always for funerals, church, and calls after one had
turned thirty. Such had been the code of the Heath family for
generations, as Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia well knew; and it was
this that had made all the harder their own fate--that their twenty-
first birthday was now forty years behind them, and not yet had either
of them attained this
cachet of respectability.
To-day, however, there was to come a change. No longer need the
carefully sponged and darned black alpaca gowns flaunt their wearers'
poverty to the world, and no longer would they force these same wearers
to seek dark corners and sunless rooms, lest the full extent of that
poverty become known. It had taken forty years of the most rigid economy
to save the necessary money; but it was saved now, and the dresses were
to be bought. Long ago there had been enough for one, but neither of the
women had so much as thought of the possibility of buying one silk gown.
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