“Very good, sir. I’ve locked up the ’ouse and seen to everythink, if you’ll switch off the lights as you come up. Good-night, Mr. Rash.”
“Good-night.”
Chapter XIV
While this conversation was taking place Letty, in the back spare room, was conducting a ceremonial too poignant for tears. There were tears in her heart, but her eyes only smarted.
Taking off the blue-black tea-gown, she clasped it in her arms and kissed it. Then, on one of the padded silk hangers, she hung it far in the depths of the closet, where it wouldn’t scorch her sight in the morning.
Next she arrayed herself in a filmy breakfast thing, white with a copper-colored sash matching some of the tones in her hair and eyes, and simple with an angelic simplicity. Standing before the long mirror she surveyed herself mournfully. But this robe too she took off, kissed, and laid away.
Lastly she put on the blue-green costume, with the turquoise and jade embroidery. She put on also the hat with the feather which shaded itself from green into monkshood blue. She put on a veil, and a pair of white gloves. For once she would look as well as she was capable of looking, though no one should see her but herself.
Viewing her reflection she grew frightened. It was the first time she had ever seen her personal potentialities. She had long known that with “half a chance” she could emerge from the cocoon stage of the old gray rag and be at least the equal of the average; but 161 she hadn’t expected so radical a change. She was not the same Letty Gravely. She didn’t know what she was, since she was neither a “star” nor a “lady,” the two degrees of elevation of which she had had experience. All she could feel was that with the advantages here presented she had the capacity to be either. Since, apparently, the becoming a lady was now excluded from her choice of careers, “stardom” would still have been within her reach, only that she was not to get the necessary “half a chance.” That was the bitter truth of it. That was to be the result of her walking on blades. All the same, as walking on blades would help her prince she was resolved to walk on them. For her mother’s sake, even for Judson Flack’s, she had done things nearly as hard, when she had not had this incentive.