“Won’t I?” Ada returned, her gravity not relaxing. “What makes you so sure?”
“Why, you simply couldn’t! My life is just one long eternal succession of queernesses. I never do anything rational; I don’t seem to know how; but you’re never anything but sensible, Ada. You’ll fall in love sensibly some day—not like me, but with just one man at a time—and he’ll be exactly the person your family’ll think you ought to be in love with. And you’ll have a nice, comfortable wedding, without any of the ushers misbehaving because you wouldn’t marry him instead;—and then you’ll bring up a large family to go to church every Sunday and take an interest in missionary work and everything. Don’t you see how much I ought to be like that, and how much you really are that? Don’t you, Ada?”
Ada shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t quite seem so,” she said. Then, beginning to stroll onward, continuing their walk, she looked even more serious than before, and inquired: “What are you going to wear to-morrow night?”
Lines almost tragic appeared upon Lily’s forehead, and her previously mentioned troubles seemed of light account compared to this one. “Oh, dear!” she wailed. “That’s another thing that’s been on my mind all day. I haven’t the least idea. What would you?”
She was still hopelessly preoccupied with the problem when she reached home, after parting with Ada at the park gates; and in her own pretty room she went to one of her two clothes’-closets even before she went to a mirror. Frowning, she looked over her party dresses.
The slim, tender-coloured fabrics, charming even though unoccupied, hung weightlessly upon small, shoulderlike shapes of nickeled wire; and as she restlessly slid the hangers to and fro along the groved central rail that held them, she produced a delicate swish and flutter among the silks and chiffons before her, so that they were like a little pageant of pretty ghosts of the dances to which their young mistress had worn them. Lily approved of none of them, however; and, hearing her mother’s firm step approaching the open door of the room, behind her, she said, desperately, without turning, “I haven’t got a thing, Mamma; I haven’t got a single thing!”
Mrs. Dodge, that solid matron, so inexplicably unlike her daughter, came into the room breathing audibly after an unusually hurried ascent of the stairs. “Lily,” she said, in the tone of one who still controls an impending emotion, “Lily, you must never do this to me again. I can’t stand it.”
“Do what to you again?” Lily inquired, absently, not turning from her inspection. “I haven’t got a thing I could wear to-morrow night, Mamma. Absolutely, I don’t see how I can go unless——”
“Lily!” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed in a tone so eloquently vehement as to command a part of her daughter’s attention. “Listen to me!”
Lily half turned, holding forth for exhibition a dress she had removed from its hanger. “What’s the matter, Mamma? This pale blue chiffon is absolutely the only thing I haven’t worn so often I just couldn’t face anybody in again; but it never was a becoming——”