"I can't stay here," was Ethie's thought, as it had been the thought of
many others, when, like her, they first step into the matted hall and
meet the wet, damp odor, as of sheets just washed, which seems to be
inseparable from that part of the building.
But that was the first day, and before she had met the kindness and
sympathy of those whose business it is to care for the patients, or felt
the influences for good, the tendency to all the better impulses of our
nature, which seems to pervade the very atmosphere of Clifton. Ethie
felt this influence very soon, and her second letter to Aunt Barbara was
filled with praise of Clifton, where she had made so many friends, in
spite of her evident desire to avoid society and stay by herself. She
had passed through the usual ordeal attending the advent of every new
face, especially if that face be a little out of the common order of
faces. She had been inspected in the dining room, and bathroom, and
chapel, both when she went in and when she went out. She had been talked
up and criticised from the way she wore her hair to the hang of her
skirts, which here, as well as in Olney, trailed the floor with a sweep
unmistakably aristocratic and stamped her as somebody. The sacque and
hat brought from Paris had been copied by three or four, and pronounced
distingué, but ugly by as many more, while Mrs. Peter Pry, of whom there
are always one or two at every watering-place, had set herself
industriously at work to pry into her antecedents to find out just who
and what Miss Bigelow was. As the result of this research, it had been
ascertained that the young lady was remotely connected with the Bigelows
of Boston, and had something of her own--that she had spent several
years abroad, and could speak both French and German with perfect ease;
that she had been at the top of Mont Blanc, and passed part of a winter
at St. Petersburg, and seen a crocodile in the river Nile, and a Moslem
burying-ground in Constantinople, and had the cholera at Milan, the
varioloid at Rome, and was marked between the eyes and on the chin, and
was twenty-five years old, and did not wear false hair, nor use Laird's
Liquid Pearl, as was at first suspected from the clearness of her
complexion, and did wear crimping pins at night, and pay Annie, the
bath-girl, extra for bringing up the morning bath, and was more
interested in the chapel exercises when the great Head Center was there,
and bought cream every morning of Mrs. King, and sat up at night long
after the gas was turned off, and was there at Clifton for spine in the
back and head difficulties generally. These few items, together with the
surmise that she had had some great trouble--a disappointment, most
likely, which affected her health--were all Mrs. Pry could learn, and
she detailed them to anyone who would listen, until Ethelyn's history,
from the Pry point of view, was pretty generally known and the most made
of every good quality and virtue.