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Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton
page 5 of 125 (04%)
years younger than behind the counter, in the heat and burden of
the day. It would have been as difficult to guess her approximate
age as that of the black silk, for she had the same worn and glossy
aspect as her dress; but a faint tinge of pink still lingered on
her cheek-bones, like the reflection of sunset which sometimes
colours the west long after the day is over.

When she had tied the parcel to her satisfaction, and laid it
with furtive accuracy just opposite her sister's plate, she sat
down, with an air of obviously-assumed indifference, in one of the
rocking-chairs near the window; and a moment later the shop-door
opened and Evelina entered.

The younger Bunner sister, who was a little taller than her
elder, had a more pronounced nose, but a weaker slope of mouth and
chin. She still permitted herself the frivolity of waving her pale
hair, and its tight little ridges, stiff as the tresses of an
Assyrian statue, were flattened under a dotted veil which ended at
the tip of her cold-reddened nose. In her scant jacket and skirt
of black cashmere she looked singularly nipped and faded; but it
seemed possible that under happier conditions she might still warm
into relative youth.

"Why, Ann Eliza," she exclaimed, in a thin voice pitched to
chronic fretfulness, "what in the world you got your best silk on
for?"

Ann Eliza had risen with a blush that made her steel-browed
spectacles incongruous.

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