A START IN LIFE


In the late 'seventies and early 'eighties the most important shop in
the town of Gabriella's birth was known to its patrons (chiefly ladies
in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and small eccentric bonnets)
as Brandywine & Plummer's drygoods store. At that period, when old Mrs.
Carr, just completing her ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven,
would have dropped dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever
step out of her class, Gabriella's mother bought her dresses (grosgrain
of the very best quality) from Major Brandywine. To be sure, even in
those days, there were other shops in the city--for was not Broad Street
already alluded to in the newspapers as "the shopping thoroughfare of
the South?"--but, though they were as numerous as dandelions in June,
these places were by no means patronized so widely by "the best people."
Small shops, of course, carrying a single line of goods and supplying
their particular products to an exacting and discriminating class, held
their own even against the established reputation of Brandywine &
Plummer's. O'Connell's linen store, Twitlow's china store, Mrs. Tonk's
doll store, and Green & Brady's store for notions--all these were
situated in Broad Street hardly a stone's throw from the Second Market.
But none of these, excellent as they were, could bear comparison with
the refined atmosphere, so different from the vulgar bustle of a modern
department store, which enveloped one in the quiet gloom of Brandywine &
Plummer's. In the first place, one could be perfectly sure that one
would be waited on by a lady--for Brandywine & Plummer's, with a
distinguished Confederate soldier at its head and front, provided an
almost conventual shelter for distressed feminine gentility. There was,
for instance, Miss Marye of the black silk counter, whose father had