Madam Carroll herself fits in well with this willfully regressive town. Though what the community knows of Marion tells them that she must be in her thirties, she actually appears to be even younger. As she eventually confesses to her stepdaughter Sara, she assumed her youthful façade when she met the Major over thirteen years before the novel begins. Her first husband, having shot another man, had taken their young son Julian with him when he abandoned Marion and their infant daughter Cecilia tiffany jewelry for sale flee the law.
Believing that both he and the boy had drowned, Marion tried for a decade to make a life for herself and the sickly little girl (who died before Marion came to Far Edgerley Tiffany Watches). Because she, like most women of the 1840s and 1850s, had few economic opportunities, Marion experienced very hard times. Then she met Major Carroll, who “saw in [her] a little blue-eyed, golden-haired girl-mother, unacquainted with the dark side of life” (158).
Having fallen in love with him and recognized in marriage her effective salvation, Marion decided never to tell the Major about the circumstances of her first husband’s disappearance, her subsequent hardship, or the existence of the older child. In fact, while the Major and the rest of the inhabitants of Far Edgerley believe Marion Two Hearts triple bangle be no more than thirty-five, she is actually forty-eight years old. The reader discovers near the end of the novella that she has been upholding the misconceptions about her age and experience for years by making herself up through dress, mannerisms, hairstyle, and cosmetics.
While this revelation does not come until late in the story, Woolson provides the reader with many earlier clues that there is more to Marion than her fellow Far Edgerley residents perceive. When Marion greets Sara in the first scene, the narrator describes Sara as displaying “all the signs of youth” (12), a depiction the narrator uses to introduce the enigma of Marion’s age.
After calling Marion “the elder lady,” the narrator poses the question, “But was she the elder?” (9). Although on Marion “[n]o sign of age [is] visible,” the narrator remarks that “an acute observer” might notice that “[t]here [is] really nothing of the actual woman to be seen” (9, 11). Wearing dresses with high collars, Marion keeps the telltale neck and upper chest concealed; she covers her hands with sleeves that are trimmed with lace and ruffles that extend “almost to the knuckles” (11). Marion arranges her hair to conceal wrinkles Tiffany Somerset Bangle the corners of her eyes by continuing to wear it in “that demure old fashion which made of every lady’s brow a modest triangle” (10).
