“That’s just like you women, always trumping up something of that kind,” replied her husband.  His words were rather brusque, but he regarded, while speaking them, his wife with adoration.  She was a very pretty woman, and looked much younger than her age.

“You needn’t tell me,” said Mrs. Lee.  “She’s just left off bonnets and got a new hat trimmed with black daisies; rather light mourning, I call it, when her sister has not been dead a year.”

“You spiteful little thing!” said her husband, still with his adoring eyes on his wife.

“Well, it’s so, anyway.”

“Well, she would make Harry a good wife, I guess,” said her husband, easily; “and she would think more of the girl.”

It was then that Wollaston got in his remark about poor Maria, who had herself noticed with wonder that her aunt had bought a new hat that spring instead of a bonnet.

“Why, Aunt Maria, I thought you always wore a bonnet!” said she, innocently, when the hat came home from the milliner’s.

“Nobody except old women are wearing bonnets now,” replied her aunt, shortly.  “I saw Mrs. Rufus Jones, who is a good deal older than I, at church Sunday with a hat trimmed with roses.  The milliner told me nobody of my age wore a bonnet.”

“Did she know how old you really are, Aunt Maria?” inquired Maria with the utmost innocence.

Harry Edgham gave a little chuckle, then came to his sister-in-law’s rescue.  He had a thankful heart for even small benefits, and Aunt Maria had done a good deal for him and his, and it had never occurred to him that the doing might not be entirely disinterested.  Besides, Aunt Maria had always seemed to him, as well as to his daughter, very old indeed.  It might have been that the bonnets had had something to do with it.  Aunt Maria had never affected fashions beyond a certain epoch, partly from economy, partly from a certain sense of injury.  She had said to herself that she was old, she had been passed by; she would dress as one who had.  Now her sentiments underwent a curious change.  The possibility occurred to her that Harry might ask her to take her departed sister’s place.  She was older than that sister, much older than he, but she looked in her glass and suddenly her passed youth seemed to look forth upon her.  The revival of hopes sometimes serves as a tonic.  Aunt Maria actually did look younger than she had done, even with her scanty frizzes.  She regarded other women, not older than herself, with pompadours, and aspiration seized her.

One day she went to New York shopping.  She secretly regarded that as an expedition.  She was terrified at the crossings.  Stout, elderly woman as she was, when she found herself in the whirl of the great city, she became as a small, scared kitten.  She gathered up her skirts, and fled incontinently across the streets, with policemen looking after her with haughty disapprobation.  But when she was told to step lively on the trolley-cars, her true self asserted its endurance.  “I am not going to step in front of a team for you or any other person,” she told one conductor, and she spoke with such emphasis that even he was intimidated, and held the car meekly until the team had passed.  When Aunt Maria came home from New York that particular afternoon, she had an expression at once of defiance and embarrassment, which both Maria and her father noticed.