ttle pressing
while my iron was on."

At seven-thirty Tessie would have emerged from her bedroom in the pink
georgette blouse that might have been considered alarmingly frank as to
texture and precariously V-cut as to neck had Tessie herself not been so
reassuringly unopulent; a black taffeta skirt, lavishly shirred and very
brief; white kid shoes, high-laced, whose height still failed to achieve
the two inches of white silk stocking that linked skirt hem to shoe top;
finally, a hat with a good deal of French blue about it.

As she passed through the sitting room on her way out her mother would
appear in the doorway, dish towel in hand. Her pride in this slim young
thing and her love of her she concealed with a thin layer of carping
criticism.

"Runnin' downtown again, I s'pose." A keen eye on the swishing skirt
hem.

Tessie, the quick-tongued, would pat the arabesque of shining hair that
lay coiled so submissively against either glowing cheek. "Oh, my, no! I
just thought I'd dress up in case Angie Hatton drove past in her auto
and picked me up for a little ride. So's not to keep her waiting."

Angie Hatton was Old Man Hatton's daughter. Any one in the Fox River
Valley could have told you who Old Man Hatton was. You saw his name at
the top of every letterhead of any importance in Chippewa, from the Pulp
and Paper Mill to the First National Bank, and including the watch
factory, the canning works, and the Mid-Western Land Company. Knowing
this, you were able to appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as
unaware of Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose
family residence was in Chippewa, Wis., but who wintered in Italy,
summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very
hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East the town
used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on the Hatton line.
Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with the sunshine and
zephyrs, was of voile and silk and crepe de Chine and satin--materials
that we had always thought of heretofore as intended exclusively for
party dresses and wedding gowns. Of course two years later they were
showing practically the same thing at Megan's dry-goods store. But that
was always the way with Angie Hatton. Even those of us who went to
Chicago to shop never quite caught up with her.

Delivered of this ironic thrust, Tessie would walk toward the screen
door with a little flaunting sway of the hips.