The Truth of the Matter Read Online Free PDF Page A

were her mother’s and even some she had inherited from her great-aunt Cettie. Wonderful material that was no longer available anywhere and that was a pleasure to work with. Agnes was a passionate seamstress, and since she was making these clothes as a gift, she took the liberty of making wardrobe choices for her daughter.
    She made two beautifully tailored suits for Betts. One a soft dove-gray wool and one of dark blue linen. Agnes took great pains to make the suits look like they had been bought at a fine dress shop. She knew about and even endorsed Betts’s worry of seeming unsophisticated, a country girl at large in the chaos of Washington. Agnes spent a great deal of time blocking the padded shoulders over a wood form and steaming the sleeves into a beautiful drape from the seam.
    “These are just amazing, Mama. I could never have found suits so well made anywhere. Or that ever fit me like this. But I’ll be about as colorful as a sparrow!”
    “Oh, well, Betts. With your blond hair . . . with your coloring! My mother always said that clothes should fit perfectly and show you off. That it shouldn’t ever be the other way around! Mama didn’t have a very happy life, you know . . . but she was famous for being so stylish. So beautiful. You remind me of her. She was tall and with blond hair, too. Well, of course, you’ve seen pictures. . . . But you have her look of . . . oh . . . of elegance, I guess. As if she were a member of some grand aristocracy. You’ve got that, too, Betts.”
    But Betts and her mother didn’t agree about clothes. Betts loved brilliant colors and any sort of exaggeration of a style. She was always coming home triumphantly with great bargains she had found. “Betts,” Agnes had said two weeks earlier, when her daughter came home with two pairs of open-toed, sling-back shoes—one pair a bright red leather and the other black patent—“the reason you can get these marked down so much is that no one else in Washburn would be caught dead in them. What I think . . . It just seems to me, Betts, that open-toed shoes are so . . . trashy!”
    But Betts’s enthusiasm remained unsquelched. The Saturday afternoon that Agnes had finished running up a simple pattern for Betts of a navy sailor-type dress with a white collar and red piping, Betts was overjoyed when she tried it on. “I’ll wear this tonight!” She turned sideways and was delighted at how the dress nipped in at the waist, flattering her figure and drawing attention to her long legs, since the dropped-waist skirt was cut on the bias and had a slight flutter at the hem when she walked. “I look wonderful in this,” she said. “Thank you, Mama! I love this dress, and we’re going out to the lake for a dance to see John Hart and Billy Oliver off.”
    “You do look pretty, Betts. You’ll leave a trail of broken hearts.” And Betts grinned because she knew it might be true. Not broken hearts, but a few crushes that some of the boys in Washburn had developed when all of a sudden they looked around and found that Betts Scofield was a beauty. She had always been around town, but all at once she was mysteriously glamorous.
    That evening, though, when Betts was dressing, she wailed from upstairs while Agnes and Howard were still at the dinner table. “My new red shoes! My new red shoes with the open toes! The sling-backs! Where have they gone? They aren’t anywhere! Oh, Mother!” And Howard and Agnes had exchanged a wary glance.
    “You’ve hidden them, Mother! Mama! I know you’ve hidden them!” But Agnes wondered how on earth Betts could ever find anything in her room. She was extravagantly untidy.
    “I won’t have you saying such things to me, Betts,” Agnes had said. But Betts searched the house in vehement indignation, even taking the cushions off the couch, looking on the high shelf in the broom closet. Agnes thought that the navy blue pumps Betts had worn to work would be much more suitable, anyway, although she knew