Beside her mother, a plump, bouncing person, with a noisy though imperfectly articulate habit of speech, and the prominent hips and bust which composed the “fine figure” of the period, Florrie seemed to float with all the elusive, magic loveliness of a sunbeam.  From the shining nimbus of her hair to her small tripping feet she was the incarnation of girlhood—­of that white and gold girlhood which has intoxicated the imagination of man.  She shed the allurement of sex as unconsciously as a flower sheds its perfume.  Though her eyes were softly veiled by her lashes, every male clerk in Brandywine & Plummer’s was dazzled by the deep blue light of her glances.  In her red mouth, with its parted lips, in the pure rose and white of her flesh, in the rich curve of her bosom, which promised already the “fine figure” of her mother, youth and summer were calling as they called in the velvet softness of the June breeze.  Innocent though she was, the powers of Life had selected her as a vehicle for their inscrutable ends.

“Where is Miss Carr?  I must speak to Miss Carr, please,” she said to one of the shop girls who came up, eager to serve her.  “Will you tell her that Miss Spencer is waiting to speak to her?”

Responding to the girl’s artless stare of admiration, she threw a friendly glance at her before she turned away to try on a monstrous white Leghorn hat decorated around the crown with a trellis of pink roses.  Unless she happened to be in a particularly bad humour—­and this was not often the case—­Florrie was imperturbably amiable.  She enjoyed flattery as a cat enjoys the firelight on its back, and while she purred happily in the pleasant warmth, she had something of the sleek and glossy look of a pretty kitten.

“How does this look on me, mother?” she asked over her shoulder of Mrs. Spencer, who was babbling cheerfully in her loud tones to Miss Lancaster, the forewoman.

Though some of the best blood in Virginia, profusely diluted with some of the worst, flowed comfortably in Mrs. Spencer’s veins, it was impossible even for her relatives to deny that she could be at times decidedly vulgar.  Having been a conspicuous belle and beauty of a bold and dashing type in her youth, she now devoted her middle-age to the enjoyment of those pleasures which she had formerly sacrificed to the preservation of her figure and her complexion.  Though she still dyed her somewhat damaged hair, and strenuously pinched in her widening waist, she had ceased, since her fiftieth birthday, to forego the lesser comforts of the body.  As she was a person of small imagination, and of no sentiment, it is probable that she was happier now than she had been in the days when she suffered the deprivations and enjoyed the triumphs of beauty.

“What’s that, Florrie?” she inquired shrilly.  “No, I shouldn’t get that if I were you.  It doesn’t flare enough.  I’m crazy about a flare.”

“But I want a pink bandeau, mother,” replied Florrie a little pettishly, as she patted her golden-red fringe.  “I wonder where Gabriella is?  Isn’t she ever coming, Miss Lancaster?”