Babbie picked up the box her dress had been packed in. There were big bunches of purple violets all over it, and a faint scent of violets exhaled from it as she gave it a vigorous toss to the further corner of her long room.
“What an idea!” she said. “We ashamed of Rachel Morrison!”
She swept up her new dress and hung it out of sight in the remotest depths of her closet.
“There!” she said, coming back to sit once more on the couch. “I can wear it down to dinner some night, I suppose, so that mother won’t notice it’s never been on. I shouldn’t like to hurt her feelings. And now the question is shall I look worse in a white duck suit that I wore mornings last year or in an organdy that the washwoman ironed so that it’s halfway up to my knees across the front and lies on the floor everywhere else. I think myself I should look more like the fair Miss Gardner in the organdy.”
“Oh, Babbie, don’t!” begged Betty. “Please don’t feel that way. Nobody wants us to look like frumps. I only thought it would be a splendid thing if we should agree to wear dresses more like what any girl in the class could afford to have. But don’t do it unless you want to, Babbie.”
Babbie kicked the fringe of the couch cover savagely with her shiny, high-heeled slipper. “I don’t want to, Betty Wales,” she declared. “I shan’t pretend that I want to, but—oh, you queer old Power behind the Throne!” She leaned forward, scattering the pillows right and left, and enveloped Betty in a riotous hug. “I might just as well do what you say first as last. The reason why you get what you want when the rest of us can’t is because you always want the right kind of things. It is absurd, of course, to have such expensive dresses when they’re almost sure to be trampled on in the crowd and ruined the first time we wear them, and it’s mean too, I suppose, if it hurts people’s feelings. So here goes for the simple life!” Babbie sent one shiny slipper flying after the violet-scented box.
“Oh, Babbie, you are a dear!” Betty’s eyes sparkled with pleasure. “If you and Christy and Nita and Alice Waite and a few of the others who always have pretty clothes will agree to it, why it will spread, I know.”
“And Jean Eastman, who probably won’t agree to it, because she didn’t think of it first, will find herself out in the cold where she belongs,” remarked Babbie affably. “And now the question still is how to dress for the part of Miss Simplicity. What shall you wear, Betty?”
“Why, all my thin things faded so in the sun down at Nassau that they are frights,” Betty explained. “I thought it would be fun to make a dress, Babbie.”