Mrs. Perry coughed apologetically. "Oh! I didn't see——"
"Charlotte dear, leave the room."
Charlotte gathered up the bits of silk in her apron. Anxious as she was to be gone, there was still something in the manner of her dismissal that offended her new sense of her own importance. She swooped and stooped for bits of silk and satin, thrusting them into her apron and work-bag. Though she seemed to be making haste her progress was maddeningly slow. The two ladies, eying her with ill-concealed impatience, made polite and innocuous conversation meanwhile.
"And have you heard that the Empress Eugénie has decided to put aside her crinoline?"
Mrs. Thrift made a sound that amounted to a sniff. "So the newspapers said last year. You remember she appeared at a court ball without a crinoline? Yes. Well, fancy how ridiculous she must have looked! She put them on again fast enough, I imagine, after that."
"Ah, but they do say she didn't. I have a letter from New York written by my friend Mrs. Hollister who comes straight from Paris and she says that the new skirts are quite flat about the—below the waist, to the knees——"
Charlotte fled the room dutifully now, with a little curtsey for Mrs. Perry. In the dark passageway she stamped an unfilial foot. Then, it is to be regretted, she screwed her features into one of those unadult contortions known as making a face. Turning, she saw regarding her from the second-story balustrade her eight-year-old sister Carrie. Carrie, ten years her sister's junior, never had been late to school; never had fallen into the Chicago River, nor off a high wooden sidewalk; always turned her toes out; held her shoulders like a Hessian.
"I saw you!" cried this true daughter of her mother.
Charlotte, mounting the stairs to her own room, swept past this paragon with such a disdainful swishing of skirts, apron, and squares of bright-colored silk stuff as to create quite a breeze. She even dropped one of the gay silken bits, saw it flutter to the ground at her tormentor's feet, and did not deign to pick it up. Carrie swooped for it. "You dropped a piece." She looked at it. "It's the orange-colored silk one!" (Destined to be the quilt's high note of color.) "Finding's keeping." She tucked it into her apron pocket. Charlotte entered her own room. "I saw you, miss." Charlotte slammed her chamber door and locked it.
She was not as magnificently aloof and unconcerned as she seemed. She knew the threat in the impish Carrie's "I saw you." In the Thrift household a daughter who had stamped a foot and screwed up a face in contempt of maternal authority did not go unpunished. Once informed, an explanation would be demanded. How could Charlotte explain that one who has been told almost daily for three weeks that she is the most enchanting, witty, beauteous, and intelligent woman in the world naturally resents being ignominiously dismissed from a room, like a chit.