TICKETS for the ball! Sent, no doubt, at the Grand Duke's request. Cousin Emily Elizabeth has got tickets too. We shall go together in the same carriage, and leaning on her husband's arm. Dempster is a handsome man, and really distingué looking. Excuse French; an educated person will break into it now and then.
The day has come. Cousin Emily has just sent me a bundle of things, with her compliments—a little box with a cake of lovely white chalk in it; another, smaller yet, filled with a pink powder that looks like ground rose-leaves, and a bottle with something liquid and dark in it, which does not seem as if it was good to drink. What on earth does Cousin E. E. expect me to do with these things?
Ah! pinned to the bundle, I find a letter, beginning "Dear Cousin Phœmie," and asking me to excuse her, but she sends the things, thinking that I may want to rejuvenate, and perhaps dye, before I go to the ball.
Rejuvenate! Does she mean to say that I'm not young enough? and if I wasn't, how are these things a-going to help me? I know that girls in school sometimes eat chalk and chew gum, but never heard that they got the younger for it. Then the pink powder—well, it's no use calculating about it, especially as she wants me to die after it. I wish Cousin E. E. would ever learn to spell. When a woman dies she does not do it with a "y" as a general thing.
Now what does all this mean?
I was doing my hair at the looking-glass, when Cousin E. E. came in, looking like a queen; her blue silk dress was all spotted with gold flowers, and it streamed out half across my bedroom. Over that she wore a long white cloak, with tassels to it, and her hair was looped in with pink roses that were not redder than her cheeks, which would have satisfied me that her health was first-rate, if it hadn't been for the shadows that lay around her eyes, which had grown awfully dark since I saw her at home.
"Oh!" says she, "I am just in time. Came early, thinking you might want help. Sit down; that will do. Now where is the you-know-what—those boxes—you understand?"
Here E. E. flung off her cloak and came to the glass. I declare to you the creature's neck was white as any snow-drift but uncovered to an extent that frightened me out of a week's growth. Her arms, too, were the same, and bare as her neck. She had a narrow pink shoulder-strap, and some lace between them, and that was all; only a string of white stones, that shone like a rainbow now and then, was around her neck and one arm; two or three of the same kind of stones hung down from her ears, and shot out light from her hair.
The whiteness of that neck astonished me, and made me look every which way.
E. E. didn't seem to mind that, but took off her long white gloves and laid them on the table; then she snatched up one of the boxes, and began to rub a handkerchief that lay on the bureau in it.