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The Ragged Edge by Harold MacGrath
page 24 of 300 (08%)

Ruth picked up both sides of the skirt and spread it, looking down.
"Is there anything wrong with it?"

"Wrong? Why, you have been imposed upon somewhere. That dress is
thirty years old, if a day."

"Oh!" Ruth laughed softly. "That is easily explained. I haven't
much money; I don't know how much it is going to cost me to reach
Hartford; so I fixed over a couple of my mother's dresses. It
doesn't look bad, does it?"

"Mercy, no! That wasn't the thought. It was that somebody had
cheated you."

The spinster did not ask if the mother lived; the question was
inconsequent. No mother would have sent her daughter into the world
with such a wardrobe. Straitened circumstances would not have
mattered; a mother would have managed somehow. In the '80s such a
dress would have indicated considerable financial means; under the
sun-helmet it was an anachronism; and yet it served only to add a
quainter charm to the girl's beauty.

"Do you know what you make me think of?"

"What?"

"As if you had stepped out of some old family album."

The feminine vanities in Ruth were quiescent; nothing had ever
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