Wharton, Edith, 1862-1937 / 2008-09-04 00:00:00


As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table,
embellished by the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet
pickles, the dress-maker's sharp swarthy person stood out vividly
between the neutral-tinted sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman
with a glossy yellow face and a frizz of black hair bristling with
imitation tortoise-shell pins. Her sleeves had a fashionable cut,
and half a dozen metal bangles rattled on her wrists. Her voice
rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a stream of anecdote
and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with acrobatic
velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always having
or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in
her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her
of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her
auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer
(a rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a
customer who was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very
wealthy lady) who had been arrested in a department store for
kleptomania; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an
old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his
mother-in-law; she had escaped from two fires in her night-gown,
and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the
hearse had run away and smashed the coffin, precipitating her
relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted
family.
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