Read "The New Cloak" by Oliver Optic online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Mrs. Waxwell loved fine clothes quite as much as any other woman of the nineteenth century, and this is saying a great deal; but then her husband was parsimonious, and she was parsimonious; and, though she loved "nice things" very much, she loved money more, which, we take it, amounts to nothing more nor less than meanness.
Mr. Waxwell was a farmer, and well off in the world. The advent of the railroad into his native town had turned things topsy-turvy in general, and "put the devil into the women" in particular, to use Mr. Waxwell's classic language. Time was when they were content to wear a straw bonnet and a calico gown to meeting; but now they had to rig out in silks and satins, with flounces and furbelows, and all sorts of rigging hitched to 'em, for all the world just like a clown in the circus. Such were Mr. Waxwell's views of the social influence of the railroad.