Explore "The New Cloak" by Oliver Optic on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.