Louise. Georgiana!
[Bella laughs out loud and sits on the sofa. Louise sits opposite Georgiana.
Georgiana. What have you got? Sit down and tell us.
Bella. Thank you, ma'am. [Delighted with the opportunity. Taking up the different parcels.] Well, I've got an elegant pair of scissors for mother, marked down because of a flaw in the steel, but she's near-sighted, and she don't want to use 'em anyway—it's just to feel she has another pair. Scissors is mother's fad—sort of born in her, I guess, for my mother's mother was a kind of dressmaker. She didn't have robes and mantucks over her door, you know,—she was too swell for that,—she went out by the day! And this is a real bronze Louis ink-stand for my sister's husband, only
cost thirty-nine cents and hasn't got a thing the matter with it, so long as you don't see the others—if you see the others, you'll observe that there's a naked lady missing off the top part which I'm glad of anyway as I'm giving it to a gentleman, and he'll never see the others besides. And this is two boxes of writing paper; aren't they huge! awful cheap with a lovely picture of an actress on top—Lillian Russell in Mice and Men, I think, on one, and Jean Duresk the Opera Singer in Lonegrind on the other. The boxes 'av got false bottoms—so there ain't very much writing material, but the rich effect's there all the same.
Georgiana. [Laughing.] Bella, you're a wonderful shopper!
Bella. And this is a copy of Homer's Iliad for my sister. Do you know it? Is it nice? Anything like Hall Caine's works, or Mary Corelli's
? She's always been my sister's favorite writeress. You see they've got a whole counter of these beautifully bound in red and gold, and only nineteen cents. But it's so hard to decide which to buy. I've about decided now to take this back and change it for Lucille. Which do you think my sister'd like best, Homer's Iliad or Lucille?
Georgiana. I believe she'd prefer Lucille, and besides half the fun in shopping is in the changing one's mind and taking things back, don't you think so?
Bella. Yes, ma'am, I think so.