Her new green flowered-muslin dress spread its twelve yards of billowing material over her hoops
and exactly matched the flat-heeled green morocco slippers
her father had recently brought her from Atlanta.
The dress set off to perfection the seventeen-inch waist, the smallest in three counties,
and the tightly fitting basque showed breasts well matured for her sixteen years.
But for all the modesty of her spreading skirts,
the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon
and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap,
her true self was poorly concealed. The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent,
willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor.
Hermanners had been imposed upon her by her mother’s gentle admonitions
and the sterner discipline of her mammy;
her eyes were her own.