"Do you expect me not to be 'kind'? To another girl, in love? Nay, oh Taffy! I leave that to the 'nicest' of the girls who think it 'horrid' to think about young men, even. Gem of Truth Number Eighty: It isn't the little girl who's had plenty to eat who's ready to snatch the bun out of the hand of the next little girl," said Leslie. She rolled the silk stockings into a ball, and rose in sections from that sagging chair. "Leslie will see you're done all right. All that remains to be discussed is the question of what you're to wear at the dance."
This question Leslie settled as the two girls went for an after-supper stroll. They went past the summer crowd patrolling the Spaniards Road, past the patch of common and the benches and the pond by the flagstaff that make that part of Hampstead so like a bit of the seaside. It was a golden evening. In the hazy distance a small, greyish, winged object rose above the plane which was Hendon, and moved to the left towards the blue taper of Harrow Church, then sank out of sight again.
"There's one," sighed Gwenna, her eyes on the glowing sky, where the biplane had been circling. "He's in it, perhaps."
"Little recking what plans are now being made for his welfare by me," observed Miss Long, as the two girls descended the hill and found at last a birch thicket that was not held by Cockney lovers. She let herself down cross-legged into the bracken. The Welsh girl perched herself on a branch of the birch tree that was polished smooth as an old bench. Thus she sat among the stirring leaves, head on one side, listening, her babyish face looking down intent against the sky.
"Ah! That's you! 'A Cherub.' That's what your fancy dress is to be," pronounced the elder girl. "Just your own little crop-curled head with nothing on it; and a ruff of cherub's wings up to your chin. Those little wings off your hat will do beautifully. Below the ruff, clouds. Appropriate background for cherubs. Your misty-white frock with no sash this time, and one of those soap-bubble coloured scarves of Liberty gauze draped over it to represent a rainbow. Little silver shoes. Strictly speaking, cherubs don't have those, of course. But if you can't become a Queen of Spain—if you can't be realistic, be pretty. Your own, nearly-always expression of dreamy innocence will come in nicely for the costume," added Leslie. "Quite in keeping."
"I'm sure I'm not that," protested the Welsh girl, piqued. "I'm not what they call 'innocent.'"
"No, I don't think you are. 'What they call innocent' in a girl is such a mixture. It means (a) no sense of humour at all; (b) the chilliest temperament you can shiver at, and (c) a complete absence of observation. But I believe you have 'beneath your little frostings the brilliance of your fires,' Taffy. Yours is the real innocence."
"It isn't, indeed," protested the girl, who was young enough to wish to be everything but what she was. "Why, look at the way you say anything to me, Leslie!"
Leslie laughed, with a remoter glance. Then suddenly she dropped her black head and put a light caress on the corner of the sunshine-yellow jersey coat.
"Be as sweet always," she said, lightly too. "Look as sweet—at the dance!"