Hollyhock House: A Story for Girls
Marion Ames Taggart
9781465659194
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Mary, Jane, and Florimel—these were the three Garden girls. Mary, Jane said, “looked it.” She was seventeen, broad and low of brow, with brown hair softly shading it, brown eyes, as warm and trusty as a dog’s, looking straight out upon a friendly world from under straight brows and long brown lashes; a mouth that might have been too large if it had not been so sweet that there could not be too much of its full rosy flexibility. She had white, strong teeth and a clean-cut, reliable sort of nose, a boyish squareness of chin, and clear wholesome tints of white, underlaid with red, in her skin. She was somewhat above medium height and moved with a fine healthy rhythm, like one thinking of her destination and not of how she looked getting to it. Last of all, she had wonderfully beautiful hands, not small, but perfectly modelled, capable, kind, healing hands which, young as they were, had the motherly look that cannot be described, yet is easily recognizable, the kind of hand that looks as if it were made expressly to support and pat baby shoulders. Jane was quite right: Mary Garden did “look like a Mary.” Jane herself, at fifteen, did not in the least suggest her name. She was small, slender, if one were polite, “thin” if not. She had red hair of the most glorious, burnished, brilliant red, masses of it, and it was not coarse, like much of the red hair, but fine and uncontrollable. It glowed and rose and flew above and around Jane’s startlingly white face till it might have been the fire around the head of an awakened Brünhilde. No one could have said positively what colour her eyes were. They possessed life rather than tint. They flashed and dreamed, laughed and gloomed under their arching brows of red gold, through their red-gold lashes, with much of the colour of her hair in them. Her face was long, with a pointed chin and a delicate little nose; its thin nostrils quick to quiver with her quickened breath. Her upper lip was so short that her small, even teeth always showed; her mouth was sensitive, not to say melancholy. Her neck was long and slender and swan-white. Her shoulders sloped; she was not more than five feet tall; her hands were long and thin, quick and fluttering, like her lips. Altogether Jane was exactly the opposite of her prim, old-time name. These two Garden girls had received Garden names from their father and his family. He had been Doctor Elias Garden, doctor of letters and physics, not of medicine; a grave man, devoted to study, old of his age, and that age twelve years more than his wife’s, to whom he had left his three little girls, when Mary was four years old, by dying untimely.
