Explore "Patience Sparhawk and her Times" by Gertrude Atherton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The next afternoon a sewing woman came and cut down an old-fashioned but handsome fur-lined cloak of Miss Tremont's to Patience's diminutive needs. When Miss Tremont returned home, after a hard day's work, she brought with her a hood, a pair of woollen gloves, and a pair of arctics; and Patience felt that she could weather a New York winter.
But Patience gave little attention to her clothes. When she was not watching the snow she was studying the steady stream of people who called at all hours, and invariably talked "church" and "temperance. " The atmosphere was so charged with religion that she was haunted by an uneasy prescience of a violent explosion during which Miss Tremont and her friends would sail upward, leaving her among the débris.