And yet Mrs. Frank Tracy, who stood on the wide piazza, looking after a
carriage which was moving down the avenue which led through the park to
the highway, did not seem as happy as the mistress of that house ought
to have been, standing there in the clear, crisp morning, with a silken
wrapper trailing behind her, a coquettish French cap on her head, and
costly jewels on her short, fat hands, which once were not as white and
soft as they were now. For Mrs. Frank Tracy, as Dorothy Smith, had known
what hard labor and poverty meant, and slights, too, because of the
poverty and labor. Her mother was a widow, sickly and lame, and Dorothy
in her girlhood had worked in the cotton mills at Langley, and bound
shoes for the firm of Newell & Brothers, and had taught a district
school, 'by way of elevating herself,' but the elevation did not pay,
and she went back to the mills in the day-time and her shoes at night,
and rebelled at the fate which had made her so poor and seemed likely to
keep her so.
But there was something better in store for her than binding shoes, or
even teaching a district school, and, from the time when young Frank
Tracy came to Langley as clerk in the Newell firm, Dorothy's life was
changed and her star began to rise.
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