had a
new tailor-made suit every fall and spring. She scented young married
troubles from afar, and we knew in the office whether his folks were
edging up on her, or her people were edging up on him. If a young
married man danced more than twice in one evening with anyone but his
wife, Miss Larrabee made faces at his back when he passed the office
window, and if she caught a young married woman flirting, Miss Larrabee
regaled us by telling with whom the woman in question had opened a
"fresh bottle of emotions."

The other way in which Miss Larrabee displayed genius for her work was
in describing women's costumes. Three or four times a year, when there
are large social gatherings, we print descriptions of the women's gowns.
Only three women in our town, Mrs. Worthington, Mrs. Conklin, and the
second Mrs. Markley, have more than one new party dress in a
twelve-month, and most of the women make a party gown last two or three
years. Miss Larrabee was familiar with every dress in town. She knew it
made over, and no woman was cunning enough to conceal the truth even
with a spangled yoke, a chiffon bertha, or a net over-dress; yet Miss
Larrabee would describe the gown, not merely twice, but half a dozen
times, so that the woman wearing it might send the description to her
relatives back East without arousing their suspicion that she was
wearing the same dress year after year. Therefore, whenever Miss
Larrabee wrote up the dresses worn at a party, we were sure to sell from
fifty to a hundred extra papers. She could so turn a breastpin and a
homemade point-lace handkerchief tucked in the front of a good old
lady's best black satin into "point-lace and diamonds," that they were
always good for a dozen copies of the paper, and she never overlooked
the dress of the wife of a good advertiser, no matter how plain it might
be.

She was worth her wages to the office merely as a compendium of shams.
She knew whether the bridal couple, who announced that they would spend
their honeymoon in the East, were really going to Niagara Falls, or
whether they were going to spend a week with his relatives in Decatur,
Illinois. She knew every woman in town who bought two prizes for her
whist party--one to give if her friend should win the prize, and another
to give if the woman she hated should win. With the diabolical eye of a
fiend she detected the woman who was wearing the dry-cleaned cast-off
clothing of her sister in the city. What she saw