“He isn’t called so generally,” Eunice said, feebly.

They were about half an hour reaching Westbridge.  Eunice by that time had plucked up a little spirit.  She reflected that Maria knew almost nothing about the shopping district, and she herself had shopped there all her life since she had been of shopping age.  Eunice had a great respect for the Westbridge stores, and considered them distinctly superior to those of Boston.  She was horrified when Maria observed, shortly before they got off the car, that she supposed they could have done much better in Boston.

“I guess you will find that Adams & Wood’s is as good a store as any you could go to in New York,” said Eunice.  “Then there is the Boston Store, too, and Collins & Green’s.  All of them are very good, and they have a good assortment.  Hardly anybody in Amity goes anywhere else shopping, they think the Westbridge stores so much better.”

“Of course it is cheaper to come here,” said Maria, as they got off the car in front of Adams & Wood’s.

“That isn’t the reason,” said Eunice, eagerly.  “Why, Mrs. Judge Saunders buys ’most everything here; says she can do enough sight better than she can anywhere else.”

“If the dress Mrs. Saunders had on at the church supper was a sample, she dresses like a perfect guy,” said Maria, as they entered the store, with its two pretentious show-windows filled with waxen ladies dressed in the height of the fashion, standing in the midst of symmetrically arranged handkerchiefs and rugs.

Maria knew that she was even cruelly pert to her aunt, but she felt like stinging—­like crowding some of the stings out of her own heart.  She asked herself was ever any girl so horribly placed as she was, married, and not married; and now she had seen some one else whom she must shun and try to hate, although she wished to love him.  Maria felt instinctively, remembering the old scenes over the garden fence, and remembering how she herself had looked that very day as she started out, with her puffy blue velvet turban rising above the soft roll of her fair hair and her face blooming through a film of brown lace, and also remembering George Ramsey’s tone as he asked if he might call, that if she were free that things might happen with her as with other girls; that she and George Ramsey might love each other, and become engaged; that she might save her school money for a trousseau, and by-and-by be married to a man of whom she should be very proud.  The patches on George Ramsey’s trousers became very dim to her.  She admired him from the depths of her heart.

“I guess we had better look at flannels first,” Eunice said.  “It won’t do to get all wool, aside from the expense, for with that Ramsey woman’s washing it wouldn’t last any time.”

She and her aunt made most of their purchases in Adams & Wood’s.  They succeeded in obtaining quite a comfortable little outfit for Jessy Ramsey, and at last boarded a car laden with packages.  Eunice had a fish-net bag filled to overflowing, but Maria, who, coming from the vicinity of New York, looked down on bags, carried her parcels in her arms.