recovered her poise and made her morning toilette.

She had taken her iron-gray hair from its pins and patted the narrow row of
frizzes into place; the flat side bands, the concise coil of hair on top
were as severely disdainful of untoward circumstance or passing fashion as
they had been any morning these forty years or more.

She wore old-fashioned corsets and was abdominally correct for her years; a
long gown of black voile with white polka dots, and a guimpe of white net
whose raff of chiffon somewhat disguised the wreck of her throat. On her
shoulders, disposed to rheumatism, she wore a tippet of brown marabout
feathers, and in her ears long jet earrings.

She had the dark brown eyes of the Ballingers, but they were bleared at
the rims, and on the downward slope of her fine aquiline nose she wore
spectacles that looked as if mounted in cast iron. Altogether an imposing
relic; and "that built-up look" as Aileen expressed it, was the only one
that would have suited her mental style. Mrs. Abbott, who dressed with a
profound regard for fashion, had long since concluded that her mother's
steadfast alliance with the past not only became her but was a distinct
family asset. Only a woman of her overpowering position could afford it.

Mrs. Groome's skin had never felt the guilty caress of cold-cream or
powder, and if it was mahogany in tint and deeply wrinkled, it was at least
as respectable as her past. In her day that now bourgeois adjective--twin
to genteel--had been synchronous with the equally obsolete word swell, but
it had never occurred to even the more modern Mrs. Abbott and her select
inner circle of friends, dwelling on family estates in the San Mateo
valley, to change in this respect at least with the changing times.