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 distingue, 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.