"Yes!" sighed Dorothy, "someone would surely swindle him out of part of his money, if he went down by his tempting old self."
It was very difficult for the sisters to go out together, because of the lack of appropriate clothing, yet neither one wished to have Mrs. Lawton as a shopping companion. Not that they were lacking in affection for their mother—far from it; but, truth to tell, she was a very silly old person, who, like a certain royal house of France, never learned anything and never forgot anything; and when she walked through the shopping district with her girls, she invariably made them wish they had never been born. She had such a dreadful habit of stopping before some show window and remarking, in a high shrill voice: "Yes, that's fairly good, but it's not to be compared with what I had when," etc., etc. Or she would sit at a counter, and, with eye-glasses on nose, carefully examine forty-cent pairs of cotton stockings, describing meantime to the clerk the exact style of silk stockings she used to wear years before, closing the incident with a condescending: "You may give me three pairs of these—though, to confess the truth, my foot has never yet become accustomed to such coarse web." Small wonder the girls did not care to shop with their mamma.
Therefore, they had spent an entire day making the preparations that were necessary if they were to go to the city together. Dorothy had pulled apart a black velvet bow from an old hat, steamed it free of wrinkles, and had made a fairly decent belt, and hours had gone to the minute stitching of her gloves; while Sybil's wrath had been aroused by the necessity of inking her purplish boot heels.
"No other shoes but mine go like that," she grumbled. "One would suppose my skirts had teeth to gnaw my heels," and at Dorothy's quick laughter Sybil attacked her with her inky bit of cotton, and their wild struggle so aroused Yellow Dick that he instantly assumed the horrid front of war—quivering his drooping wings, extending his neck, with wee beak open an eighth of an inch wide, and fierce crest rising and lowering rapidly. He felt himself to be a terrifying object, and nothing short of three fat hemp seeds, held to him between the lovely lips of Sybil could induce him to accept peace.
"What a quick-tempered little wretch Dick has become of late," said Dorothy.
"Oh, well—never mind his small tantrums, so long as he doesn't begin to tell about what a splendid cage he used to have."
"He can't," laughed Dorothy, "for he was hatched as well as brought up in this old cage—he doesn't know any other."
"Thank Heaven for that!" responded Sybil, who then ran to the window, crying:
"There she goes, Dorrie!" and her sister understood at once that "she" was that actress-neighbor of whom Sybil dreamed at night and talked by day. For of late the girl's desire to go upon the stage had developed into a passion. Ardent, romantic, and imaginative as she was, the sweetness of a life of ease and pleasure would probably have smothered the ambition that sharp necessity was now rapidly developing. For it is the almost sterile soil of poverty that oftenest produces the cactus-like plant of Ambition, whose splendid and dazzling flowers are, alas, so often without perfume.
And now Dorothy had John Strange Winter and The Duchess quite to herself evenings, while Sybil thumbed the family Shakspere—a dreadful edition of the fifties, all aflaunt with gilt edges and gilt lettering on the outside, and sprinkled through with most harrowing pictures and libellous and defamatory portraits of Forrest, Cushman, and the rest—for the steel engraver too "loveth a shining mark."