chested (she'd need to be with that dêcolletage), carrying feather fan.
You could tell a Brewster cover at sight, without the fan. That leaves
the black net dress and the sun-parlour valance. The first had grown too
tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.

Now, don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking,
ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a
palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and
slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin,
were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at
Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless
heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of
citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and
to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.

Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and georgette and alligator pears; and
Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up
above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the
afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster
place was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen
closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises,
as your well-to-do Middle-Western house is likely to be.

That house had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically,
that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had they--in
tolerance and understanding and humanness--until now, as you talked with
them, you felt that here was room and to spare of sun-filled mental
chambers, and shelves well stored with experience; and pantries and bins
and closets for all your worries and confidences.