“You’re one of the lucky ones,” continued Mrs Wishing. “I allers said that. Fust you get taken into a beautiful home like this, and then you get a place as a gal twice your age would jump at. Some gets all the ups and some gets all the downs. But I dunno!”
She went on her way with a weary hitch of the basket on her arm, and a pull at her thin shawl. Then Bella’s voice sounded beseechingly on the stairs:
“Oh, do come here a minute, Lilac.”
Bella was generally to be found in her bedroom just now, stitching away at various elegancies of costume. She turned to her cousin as she entered, and said with a puzzled frown:
“I’m in ever such a fix with this skirt. I can’t drape it like the picture do what I will, it hangs anyhow. And Agnetta can’t manage it either.”
Agnetta stood by, her face heated with fruitless labour, and her mouth full of pins.
Lilac examined the skirt gravely.
“You haven’t got enough stuff in it,” she said. “You’ll have to do it up some other way.”
“Pin it up somehow, then, and see what you can do,” said Bella. “I’m sick and tired of it.”
Lilac was not quite without experience in such things, for she had often helped her cousins with their dressmaking, and she now succeeded after a few trials in looping up the skirt to Bella’s satisfaction.