“Dog mange cure is grand for your scalp,” Madge volunteered as the discussion became general.
“Is it?” Mimi asked turning to Madge. She had never given much thought to her personal appearance other than cleanliness. She was always too busy doing something. The silliest thing she ever watched was a girl standing near the highest window, mirror in one hand, tweezers in the other, plucking her eyebrows. She didn’t plan to go in for that sort of beauty; something, say, which would improve her hair—Mother Dear hadn’t made any suggestions about it in so long. It was getting more unruly. She’d tried changing the part from the right side to the left and that had only made it worse. She was thinking of letting it grow long enough to braid so that she could wear it like Dit’s, but the thoughts of shedding hairpins and never finding a hat big enough kept her from it.
“What does it do to your hair, Madge?”
“Oh, makes it shiny and fluffy and thick and long. I saw a picture on a box of a woman whose hair fell from her shoulders to her knees. I had a cousin who put mange cure on her hair and——”
“Stop!” Sue cried. “Waste no more words. You’ve already sold her the idea. I can tell by the smooth and oily waves”—she made rippling motions with her hands and arms mimicking a favorite gesture of Mimi’s—“that the fragrance of mange cure will soon permeate the hithertofore wholesome air of Tumble Inn. I wouldn’t put that awful smelling stuff on my hair for—for——”
She gave up trying to find a word bad enough to describe it.
“But you only leave it on one night. Besides it washes off, and furthermore, I don’t mind the odor. It’s a good clean smell like tar.”
“Rave on,” Sue encouraged disdainfully. “Pretty soon you’ll have it sweet scented as dew hung jasmine in the rosy dawn. Blah! You’ll have Mimi believing she can pose for the pictures in the hair tonic ads after two trial bottles. Double blah!”
Two weeks passed before Mimi had an opportunity to buy the dog mange cure.
With Commencement so near, every afternoon now some teacher chaperoned a group of shoppers to town. Mimi joined the first group. In order to make her purchase before the others were ready to leave, she left a few sups in the bottom of her chocolate malted milk glass. Anyhow she never could get every drop without making that vulgar zooping, sucking sound on account of the whipped cream settling to the bottom. She didn’t want to “strike bottom” before a chaperon. She had done well to juggle the cherry on two straws safely to her mouth.