beautiful party dresses, and the recipient of gifts from
romantic, aspiring young poets?



V. The September Chapter


In September the Old Lady looked back on the summer and owned
to herself that it had been a strangely happy one, with
Sundays and Sewing Circle days standing out like golden
punctuation marks in a poem of life. She felt like an utterly
different woman; and other people thought her different also.
The Sewing Circle women found her so pleasant, and even
friendly, that they began to think they had misjudged her, and
that perhaps it was eccentricity after all, and not meanness,
which accounted for her peculiar mode of living. Sylvia Gray
always came and talked to her on Circle afternoons now, and
the Old Lady treasured every word she said in her heart and
repeated them over and over to her lonely self in the watches
of the night.

Sylvia never talked of herself or her plans, unless asked
about them; and the Old Lady's self-consciousness prevented
her from asking any personal questions: so their conversation
kept to the surface of things, and it was not from Sylvia, but
from the minister's wife that the Old Lady finally discovered
what her darling's dearest ambition was.

The minister's wife had dropped in at the old Lloyd place one