The Flaxborough Crab

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Miss Brangwyn Butters, Flaxborough’s assistant Librarian, was thirty-six years old. She was healthy and had been described more than once as handsome. No one had ever declared her pretty. This did not worry her at all. She did not despise beauty, but she recognized that it could be more of a nuisance than an asset. From what she had heard of the conversation of the younger girls in her charge at the municipal library, it was clear that their concern with their good looks and with the attention they drew was by no means an entirely happy state of mind. Miss Butters saw nothing to be envied in a preoccupation with weighing machines and tape measures. Nor did she feel any sense of loss in being unable to share in that vapid, fragmentary, apparently endless discussion of cosmetics and fashion which was the girls’ sole intellectual exercise. The truth was, she told herself, that underneath their preening and chatter they were afraid.

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