"I must confess it doesn't look as if it were fitted to you in perfect health," confessed Roberta, "but it's one of those soft clinging things that doesn't have to fit like a glove. I can pin it up on you to make it look all right, and it's so pretty with all that fine lace and embroidery that it'll pass muster anywhere."
Gay sat down to make some slight alteration in the girdle, while Roberta invited Mary to a seat in front of the dressing-table, proposing to try her skill on her as a hair-dresser. It was all so delightfully intimate and friendly, just such a situation as Mary had longed for in her dream-castle building, that she even felt at liberty to grow a little personal with Roberta. She peeped out through the hair which now hung over her face, to watch Roberta's face reflected in the mirror opposite.
"Do you know," she remarked with a mischievous glance, like a skye terrier peeping through its bangs, "that I've actually lain awake nights, wondering if you'd been persuaded yet to give up that 'adorable little curl.'"
Roberta's mouth opened wide in astonishment, and she dropped the comb with which she was parting Mary's hair.
"How spooky!" she cried. "I was just thinking about that myself. Who in the world told you anything about that?"
"Oh, I overheard the remark," confessed Mary. "I was on one of those hotel balconies all hidden by moon-vines when you and Gay and Mr. Wade and the officer you call Bogey came out into the court. I was so lonesome for some young person to talk to, and so close to you all that I could see the comb slipping out of Gay's hair. I didn't know who she was then. If I had I should have leaned over the railing and called to her. Wouldn't it have made a sensation?
"I'll never forget how either of you looked. She was in white with white violets, and you were in pale lemon yellow with a scarf over your shoulders that looked like a white moonbeam spangled with dewdrops. It slipped down as you started to go and see the alligators, and that Mr. Wade drew it up for you and said what he did about the curl."
"That was the first time he ever mentioned it," explained Roberta. "I thought when you spoke that you meant last night. I was going to tell Gay about it, and as long as you're so interested I don't mind telling you, too. You know Mr. Wade has been very nice to me, and I thought he was great fun until he began to get sentimental. My brother William knew him at college, and he told me what I might expect. He said 'that chap always gets sentimental with every girl he goes with.' It's a great thing to have plenty of brothers to put you wise.
"When Mr. Wade began that nonsense about wanting one of those little curls and its being the most fetching thing he had ever seen I laughed at him. But it only made him the more determined. He wrote some poetry about wearing it over his heart forever and all that sort of thing. If he only could have known how Billy and I shrieked over it! Of course I hadn't given him the slightest encouragement, or it would have been different—"
"Roberta," interrupted Gay sternly, "how can you say that? You know you looked at him. I saw you do it. And when you look out at anybody from under those lashes, whether you mean it or not you do look flirtatious, and you know it."