THE BLACK SILK GOWNS
The Heath twins, Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia, rose early that morning, and the world looked very beautiful to them—one does not buy a black silk gown every day; at least, Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia did not. They had waited, indeed, quite forty years to buy this one.
The women of the Heath family had always possessed a black silk gown. It was a sort of outward symbol of inward respectability—an unfailing indicator of their proud position as members of one of the old families. It might be donned at any time after one's twenty–first birthday, and it should be donned always for funerals, church, and calls after one had turned thirty. Such had been the code of the Heath family for generations, as Miss Priscilla and Miss Amelia well knew; and it was this that had ma
