“But I must remember,” she told herself, “that I had a good time getting that sunburn, and it isn’t as if I hadn’t already been paid by happiness for its awfulness.”
The pink dress didn’t look as pretty as it had when she had tried it on before her mirror at Andrews, because pink never did go so very well with that odd shade of flaming red that Peggy’s face showed. There was a bright and distinct line, too, around her neck, all red above the line and all white below, where her collar had protected the skin. She tied a strip of black velvet around this tell-tale mark, humming the while, for it seemed that she might as well be cheerful over this, one of the worst disasters that had ever happened to her.
“They’ll see this black ribbon and just think I’ve tied it too tight,” she explained to her friends hopefully, “and that it’s choking me, making my face so red.”
Katherine and Florence failed to see the advantage of having them think this, but they kind-heartedly refrained from saying so, and let Peggy take what comfort she could out of so plausible a belief.
In her heart of hearts, perhaps, Peggy was remembering the occasion when she had dressed so carefully for the matinée that she didn’t get to the matinée at all, and was deciding that being on hand was really more important than making a good appearance.
She went to the hop, her spirits as light as her dancing feet, and when Harold Wilbering came eagerly over to her, she and he laughed at what had happened to her face, but he discovered what Peggy had not the least idea of for herself, that the sunburn effect was really rather becoming. It made her so vivid and so alive. It looked merely as if she were blushing all the time, and Harold liked it. And who could help enjoying himself in talking to Peggy that evening, as she became more and more forgetful of her tragedy, and more and more able to give her whole attention to just having a good time? It was rare that so appreciative a young lady came to one of their early hops. The boys were quite accustomed to girls who had been to a great many more dances than they had, and who sometimes made them feel just a little young. But Peggy so doted on it all, was so carried away by the Marine band, so ready to laugh at their simplest and most time-worn jokes, so wonderingly surprised and naïvely gratified at their own open admiration of her, that she took like wildfire, and half the academy was talking about that little Parsons girl for a week thereafter.
Peggy went back with the girls to their rooms, her laughter just bubbling at her lips and her sense of satisfaction perfect.
She took down her hair chattering all the time, and when at last the three turned out the light and crept into bed,—for Katherine and she and Florence shared one room, Florence sleeping on the couch and Peggy and Katherine in the big bed, she whispered blissfully into the darkness, “Oh, hasn’t this been a most dazzling day! I don’t know when I’ve had such a lovely, lovely time. I don’t someway think it’s just little Peggy Parsons with a red face that went through all that beautifulness, but instead I feel as if I’d been a fairy princess—the change that Cinderella experienced and all that—and, oh, how I do hate to wake up in the morning and realize that my coach and four has turned into pumpkin!”
“You looked nice in spite of your face, Peggy,” said Florence. “And, someway, everybody did seem to take an awful shine to you.”
And then Florence’s talk drifted off to the partners she had had, and what each one had looked like and what they said. And whenever she paused for breath Katherine interrupted with the story of her adventures and in the midst of their dialogue the fairy princess and Cinderella and little tired red-faced Peggy Parsons, all rolled into one, went off to sleep and dreamed the enchanted dreams of youth.