It is a popular conceit of our sex that we are superior to any
effect of feminine adornment, and that a pretty girl is equally
pretty in the simplest frock. Yet there was not a man in the room
who did not believe that Yerba in her present attire was not only
far prettier than before, but that she indicated a new and more
delicate form of beauty. It was not the mere revelation of contour
and color of an ordinary decollete dress, it was a perfect
presentment of pure symmetry and carriage. In this black grenadine
dress, trimmed with jet, not only was the delicate satin sheen of
her skin made clearer by contrast, but she looked every inch her
full height, with an ideal exaltation of breeding and culture. She
wore no jewelry except a small necklace of pearls--so small it
might have been a child's--that fitted her slender throat so
tightly that it could scarcely be told from the flesh that it
clasped. Paul did not know that it was the gift of the mother to
the child that she had forsworn only a few weeks before she parted
from her forever; but he had a vague feeling that, in that sable
dress that seemed like mourning, she walked at the funeral of her
mother's past. A few white flowers in her corsage, the companions
of the solitary one in his button-hole, were the only relief.
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