them on? The right hand, if you will. Perhaps you'd better remove your elegant
ring; I should n't like to have anything catch in the setting."

"Miss Dix! Six-and-a-half black glace'--upper shelf, third box--for this lady.
She's in a hurry. We shall see you often after this, I hope, madam."

"No; we don't keep silk or lisle gloves. We have no call for them; our
customers prefer kid."

Oh, but he was in his element, was Claude Merrill; though the glamour that
surrounded him in the minds of the Edgewood girls did not emanate wholly from
his finicky little person: something of it was the glamour that belonged to
Boston,--remote, fashionable, gay, rich, almost inaccessible Boston, which
none could see without the expenditure of five or six dollars in railway fare,
with the added extravagance of a night in a hotel, if one would explore it
thoroughly and come home possessed of all its illimitable treasures of wisdom
and experience.

When Claude came to Edgewood for a Sunday, or to spend a vacation with his
aunt, he brought with him something of the magic of a metropolis. Suddenly, to
Rose's eye, Stephen looked larger and clumsier, his shoes were not the proper
sort, his clothes were ordinary, his neckties were years behind the fashion.
Stephen's dancing, compared with Claude's, was as the deliberate motion of an
ox to the hopping of a neat little robin. When Claude took a girl's hand in
the "grand right-and-left," it was as if he were about to try on a delicate
glove; the manner in which he "held his lady" in the polka or schottische made
her seem a queen. Mite Shapley was so affected by it that when Rufus attempted
to encircle her for the mazurka she exclaimed, "Don't act as if you were
spearing logs, Rufus!"