The Mrs. Pry of this summer was not ill-natured; she was simply
curious; and as she generally said more good than evil of people, she
was generally liked and tolerated by all. She was not a fashionable
woman, nor an educated woman, though very popular with her neighbors at
home, and she was there for numbness and swollen knees; and, having knit
socks for four years for the soldiers, she now knit stockings for the
soldiers' orphans, and took a dash every morning and screamed loud
enough to be heard at the depot when she took it, and had a pack every
afternoon, and corked her right ear with cotton, which she always took
out when in a pack, so as to hear whatever might be said in the hall,
her open ventilator being the medium of sound. This was Mrs. Peter Pry,
drawn from no one in particular, but a fair exponent of characters found
in other places than Clifton Springs. Rooming on the same floor with
Ethelyn, whom she greatly admired, the good woman persisted until she
overcame the stranger's shyness, and succeeded in establishing, first, a
bowing, then a speaking, and finally, a calling acquaintance between
them--the calls, however, being mostly upon one side, and that the
prying one.
Ethie had been at Clifton for three or four weeks, and the dimensions of
No. 101 did not seem half so circumscribed, as at first. On the whole,
she was contented, especially after the man who snored, and the woman
who wore squeaky boots, and talked in her sleep, vacated No. 102, the
large, airy, pleasant room adjoining her own. There was no one in it now
but Mary, the chambermaid, who said it was soon to be occupied by a sick
gentleman, adding that she believed he had the consumption, and hoped
his cough would not fret Miss Bigelow. Ethie hoped so too. Nervousness,
and, indeed, diseases of all kinds, seemed to develop rapidly at
Clifton, where one has nothing to do but to watch each new symptom, and
report to physician or nurse, and Ethie was not an exception. She was
very nervous, and she found herself dreading the arrival of the sick
man, wondering if his coughing would keep her awake nights, and if the
light from her candle shining out into the darkened hall would annoy
and worry him, as it had worried the woman opposite, who complained that
she could not rest with that glimmer on the wall, showing that somebody
was up, who, might at any moment make a noise. That he was a person of
consequence she readily guessed, for an extra pair of pillows was taken
in, and the rocking-chair possessed of two whole arms, and No. 109, also
vacant just then, was rifled of its round stand and footstool, and Mrs.
Pry reported that Dr. F---- himself had been up to see that all was
comfortable, and Miss Clark had ordered a better set of springs, with a
new hair mattress, and somebody had put a bouquet of flowers in the room
and hung a muslin curtain at the window.