“Becoming?” she cried. “It is dreadful! It is fearful. It makes me look like an old woman!”
With an angry jerk she snatched the offending hat from her head and threw it across the room.
Patty was about to give a horrified exclamation when the funny side of it struck her, and she burst into laughter. Mrs. Van Reypen was really an elderly lady, and her angry surprise at being made to look like one seemed very funny to Patty.
But in a moment she understood the case.
She had thought the hat in question of too youthful a type for Mrs. Van Reypen, and in retrimming it had made it more subdued and of a quieter, more elderly fashion.
But she now realised that she had been expected to make it of even gayer effect than it had shown at first. This was an easy matter, and picking up the hat she straightened it out, and hastily catching up a bunch of pink roses and a glittering buckle, she said:
“Oh, it isn’t finished yet; these other trimmings I want to put in place while the hat is on your head.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Van Reypen, only half-convinced.
But she sat down again, and Patty replaced the hat, and then adjusted the roses and the buckle, giving the whole a dainty, pretty effect, which though over-youthful, perhaps, was really very becoming to the fine-looking old lady.
“Charming!” she exclaimed, letting her recent display of bad temper go without apology. “I felt sure you could do it. This afternoon we will go out to the shops and buy some materials, and you shall make me another hat.”