He had no particular theory on the
subject; it had scarcely as yet become a necessity of self-defence to
have a collection of theories. It simply appeared to him proper and
reasonable that a well-bred young woman should not carry half her
fortune on her back. Catherine's back was a broad one, and would
have carried a good deal; but to the weight of the paternal
displeasure she never ventured to expose it, and our heroine was
twenty years old before she treated herself, for evening wear, to a
red satin gown trimmed with gold fringe; though this was an article
which, for many years, she had coveted in secret. It made her look,
when she sported it, like a woman of thirty; but oddly enough, in
spite of her taste for fine clothes, she had not a grain of coquetry,
and her anxiety when she put them on was as to whether they, and not
she, would look well. It is a point on which history has not been
explicit, but the assumption is warrantable; it was in the royal
raiment just mentioned that she presented herself at a little
entertainment given by her aunt, Mrs. Almond. The girl was at this
time in her twenty-first year, and Mrs. Almond's party was the
beginning of something very important.
Some three or four years before this Dr. Sloper had moved his
household gods up town, as they say in New York. He had been living
ever since his marriage in an edifice of red brick, with granite
copings and an enormous fanlight over the door, standing in a street
within five minutes' walk of the City Hall, which saw its best days
(from the social point of view) about 1820.
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