Lizzie put up the pretty brown hair that came tumbling down, owing to the energy with which Bella shook her head; and she remonstrated while thus engaged, ‘My dear!’
‘Oh, it’s all very well to call me your dear,’ said Bella, with a pettish whimper, ‘and I am glad to be called so, though I have slight enough claim to be. But I am such a nasty little thing!’
‘My dear!’ urged Lizzie again.
‘Such a shallow, cold, worldly, Limited little brute!’ said Bella, bringing out her last adjective with culminating force.
‘Do you think,’ inquired Lizzie with her quiet smile, the hair being now secured, ‘that I don’t know better?’
‘Do you know better though?’ said Bella. ‘Do you really believe you know better? Oh, I should be so glad if you did know better, but I am so very much afraid that I must know best!’
Lizzie asked her, laughing outright, whether she ever saw her own face or heard her own voice?
‘I suppose so,’ returned Bella; ‘I look in the glass often enough, and I chatter like a Magpie.’
‘I have seen your face, and heard your voice, at any rate,’ said Lizzie, ‘and they have tempted me to say to you—with a certainty of not going wrong—what I thought I should never say to any one. Does that look ill?’
‘No, I hope it doesn’t,’ pouted Bella, stopping herself in something between a humoured laugh and a humoured sob.