"I do not forget."
Black was not a fashionable wear in that age, only being used for
mourning. A woman wearing black did it to proclaim she sorrowed for the
dead. The sentiment attached to her sable garments heightened the interest
awakened by Deleah's slight form and her winsome face;--made her clear
skin paler; made her eyes shine more jewel-like beneath the fine line of
her black brows.
Among the members of her own sex were, at the period of her eighteenth
birthday, all the captives to her charms of which Deleah was aware. There
is no such ardent lover as a schoolgirl when she conceives a passion for
another girl at school; and half a dozen of the little pupils at Miss
Chaplin's were head over ears in love with Deleah Day. They sighed at her,
their adoring eyes clung to her face, they suffered agonies of jealousy
through her. They were cast down by a word, elated by a smile.
One of the girls then acquiring a polite education at Miss Chaplin's
seminary remembers to this day how she slept, night after night, with a
glove--such a worn and shabby glove--of the young English teacher beneath
her pillow. She possesses still an album called "The Deleah Book," wherein
is pasted an atrocious photograph--all photographs (cartes-de-visite they
were called)--were libellous and atrocious in those days--of a girl in a
black frock, the skirt a little distended at the feet by the small hoop of
the day, a short black jacket, with black hair parted in the middle over a
smudge of a face and gathered into a net at the back of the neck.
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