Funny Story from my Maternal Grandmother's Knee (metaphorical Knee)

I was fascinated, as a four-year-old falling asleep on my grandmother's lap while she droned on about her family history, to learn that my grandmother (my mother's mother) had herself had a mother--whom I had never known, because she'd died, "of overwork and stomach cancer," a dozen years before I was born, and whom I supposed, on hearing that she had been my great grandmother, must have been an heroic, even saintly, personage; but when I roused myself to ask my grandmother if this were not so...,

Suddenly the torpors of our afternoon nap were dispelled, and there in the tingling air was the too-vivid recollection of Great-Grandmother Ellen Moore (née Rockhill)'s disapproval of her youngest daughter for being in her mid-30's and wearing a red (as in harlot) dress. "No respectable woman over thirty... etc." And it was a dark red dress, and not 'disrespectable' at all.