We discussed one night the suitable age for a girl to become mistress of herself.  The boy of the household maintained that at eighteen a girl could marry, but that she must be twenty-one before she could have her own way.  All the girls insisted that they could and did boss themselves and had even before they were eighteen.

Two chums who boarded in my house gave a charming illustration of the carelessness and the extravagance, the independence and love of it which characterizes feminine America.  One of these was a deracinee, a child with a foreign touch in her twang; a legend of other climes in the dexterity of her deft fingers; some memory of an exile from France in her name:  Lorraine.  Her friend was a mondaine.  She had the social gift, a subtle understanding of things worldly, the glissey mortel n’appuyez jamais attitude toward life.  By a touch of flippancy, an adroit turn of mind, she kept the knowing mastery over people which has mystified and delighted in all great hostesses since the days of Esther.

When the other girls waited feverishly for love letters, she was opening a pile of invitations to socials and theatre parties.  Discreet and condescending, she received more than she gave.

As soon as the posters were out for a Tuesday performance of “Faust,” preparations began in the household to attend.  Saturday shopping and supper were hurried through and by six o’clock Lorraine was at the sewing machine tucking chiffon for hats and bodices.  After ten hours’ work in the mill, she began again, eager to use the last of the spring twilight, prolonged by a quarter moon.  There was a sudden, belated gust of snow; in the blue mist each white frame house glowed with a warm, pink light from its parlour stove.  Lorraine’s fingers flew.  A hat took form and grew from a heap of stuff into a Parisian creation; a bolero was cut and tucked and fitted; a skirt was ripped and stitched and pressed; a shirt-waist was started and finished.  For two nights the girls worked until twelve o’clock so that when the “show” came they might have something new to wear that nobody had seen.  This must have been the unanimous intention of the Perry populace, for the peanut gallery was a bower of fashion.  Styles, which I had thought were new in Paris, were familiarly worn in Perry by the mill hands.  White kid gloves were en regle.  The play was “Faust.”  All allusions to the triumph of religion over the devil; all insinuations on the part of Mephistopheles in regard to the enviable escape of Martha’s husband and of husbands in general, from prating women in general; all invocations of virtue and moral triumph, were greeted with bursts of applause.  Between the acts there was music, and the ushers distributed showers of printed advertisements, which the audience fell at once to reading as though they had nothing to talk about.

I heard only one hearty comment about the play:  “That devil,” said Lorraine, as we walked home together, “was a corker!”