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Oldport Days by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
page 12 of 175 (06%)
retardation indeed--to fondle in his arms a puppy or a kitten.
Yet he is liable to excitement, in his way; for once, in some
high debate, wherein he assisted as listener, when one old man on
a wharf was doubting the assertion of another old man about a
certain equinoctial gale, I saw my friend draw his right hand
slowly and painfully from his pocket, and let it fall by his
side. It was really one of the most emphatic gesticulations I
ever saw, and tended obviously to quell the rising discord. It
was as if the herald at a tournament had dropped his truncheon,
and the fray must end.

Women's faces are apt to take from old age a finer touch than
those of men, and poverty does not interfere with this, where
there is no actual exposure to the elements. From the windows of
these old houses there often look forth delicate, faded
countenances, to which belongs an air of unmistakable refinement.
Nowhere in America, I fancy, does one see such counterparts of
the reduced gentlewoman of England,--as described, for instance,
in "Cranford,"-- quiet maiden ladies of seventy, with perhaps a
tradition of beauty and bellehood, and still wearing always a bit
of blue ribbon on their once golden curls,--this headdress being
still carefully arranged, each day, by some handmaiden of sixty,
so long a house-mate as to seem a sister, though some faint
suggestion of wages and subordination may be still preserved.
Among these ladies, as in "Cranford," there is a dignified
reticence in respect to money-matters, and a courteous blindness
to the small economies practised by each other. It is not held
good breeding, when they meet in a shop of a morning, for one to
seem to notice what another buys.

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