"You just bet I can, young lady," said the milliner to herself as
Kate walked down the street.
From afar, Kate saw Nancy Ellen on the veranda, so she walked
slowly to let the effect sink in, but it seemed to make no
impression until she looked up at Nancy Ellen's very feet and
said: "Well, how do you like it?"
"Good gracious!" cried Nancy Ellen. "I thought I was having a
stylish caller. I didn't know you! Why, I never saw YOU walk
that way before."
"You wouldn't expect me to plod along as if I were plowing, with a
thing like this on my head, would you?"
"I wouldn't expect you to have a thing like that on your head; but
since you have, I don't mind telling you that you are stunning in
it," said Nancy Ellen.
"Better and better!" laughed Kate, sitting down on the step. "The
milliner said it was a stunning HAT."
"The goose!" said Nancy Ellen. "You become that hat, Kate, quite
as much as the hat becomes you."
The following day, dressed in a linen suit of natural colour, with
the black bow at her throat, the new hat in a bandbox, and the
renewed sailor on her head, Kate waved her farewells to Nancy
Ellen and Robert on the platform, then walked straight to the
dressing room of the car, and changed the hats. Nancy Ellen had
told her this was NOT the thing to do. She should travel in a
plain untrimmed hat, and when the dust and heat of her journey
were past, she should bathe, put on fresh clothing, and wear such
a fancy hat only with her best frocks, in the afternoon. Kate
need not have been told that. Right instincts and Bates economy
would have taught her the same thing, but she had a perverse
streak in her nature. She had SEEN herself in the hat.
The milliner, who knew enough of the world and human nature to
know how to sell Kate the hat, when she never intended to buy it,
and knew she should not in the way she did, had said that before
fall it would bring her a carriage, which put into bald terms
meant a rich husband. Now Kate liked her school and she gave it
her full attention; she had done, and still intended to keep on
doing, first-class work in the future; but her school, or anything
pertaining to it, was not worth mentioning beside Nancy Ellen's
HOME, and the deep understanding and strong feeling that showed so
plainly between her and Robert Gray. Kate expected to marry by
the time she was twenty or soon after; all Bates girls had, most
of them had married very well indeed. She frankly envied Nancy
Ellen, while it never occurred to her that any one would criticise
her for saying so. Only one thing could happen to her that would
surpass what had come to her sister. If only she could have a man
like Robert Gray, and have him on a piece of land of their own.
Kate was a girl, but no man of the Bates tribe ever was more
deeply bitten by the lust for land. She was the true daughter of
her father, in more than one way. If that very expensive hat was
going to produce the man why not let it begin to work from the
very start? If her man was somewhere, only waiting to see her,
and the hat would help him to speedy recognition, why miss a
change?