She was not a fashionable
woman, nor an educated woman, though very popular with her neighbors at
home, and she was there for numbness and swollen knees; and, having knit
socks for four years for the soldiers, she now knit stockings for the
soldiers' orphans, and took a dash every morning and screamed loud
enough to be heard at the depot when she took it, and had a pack every
afternoon, and corked her right ear with cotton, which she always took
out when in a pack, so as to hear whatever might be said in the hall,
her open ventilator being the medium of sound. This was Mrs. Peter Pry,
drawn from no one in particular, but a fair exponent of characters found
in other places than Clifton Springs. Rooming on the same floor with
Ethelyn, whom she greatly admired, the good woman persisted until she
overcame the stranger's shyness, and succeeded in establishing, first, a
bowing, then a speaking, and finally, a calling acquaintance between
them--the calls, however, being mostly upon one side, and that the
prying one.
Ethie had been at Clifton for three or four weeks, and the dimensions of
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