Other women of her age might of their choice drop into charities, or
cats, or nephews and nieces, railing against the present and living
only in the past; holding on like grim death to everything that made
it respect able, so that they looked for all the world like so many old
daguerreotypes pulled from the frames. Not so Miss Felicia Grayson of
Geneseo, New York. Her past was a flexible, india-rubber kind of a past
that she stretched out after her. She might still wear her hair as she
did when the old General raved over her, although the frost of many
winters had touched it; but she would never hold on to the sleeves of
those days or the skirts or the mantles: Out or in they must go,
be puffed, cut bias, or made plain, just as the fashion of the day
insisted. Oh! a most level-headed, common-sense, old aristocrat was Dame
Felicia!

With the arrival of the first carriage old Isaac Cohen moved his seat
from the back to the front of his shop, so he could see everybody who
got out and went in, as well as everybody who walked past and gazed up
at the shabby old house and its shabbier steps and railings. Not that
the shabby surroundings ever made any difference whether the guests were
"carriage company" or not, to quote good Mrs. McGuffey. Peter would not
be Peter if he lived anywhere else, and Miss Felicia wouldn't be half
so quaint and charming if she had received her guests behind a marble
or brownstone front with an awning stretched to the curbstone and a
red velvet carpet laid across the sidewalk, the whole patrolled by a
bluecoat and two hired men.

The little tailor had watched many such functions before. So had the
neighbors, who were craning their heads from the windows. They all knew
by the carriages when Miss Felicia came to town and when she left, and
by the same token for that matter. The only difference between this
reception and former receptions, or teas, or whatever the great people
upstairs called them, was in the ages of the guests; not any gray
whiskers and white heads under high silk hats, this time; nor any demure
or pompous, or gentle, or, perhaps, faded old ladies puffing up Peter's
stairs--and they did puff before they reached his door, where they
handed their wraps to Mrs. McGuffey in her brave white cap and braver
white apron. Only bright eyes and rosy faces today framed in tiny bon
nets, and well-groomed young fellows in white scarfs and black coats.

But if anybody had thought of the shabby sur