Polly subsided.
“I am coming,” she said, in her meekest way; and after pinning the washing list to the compact brown holland bundle, she put it outside the door, and forthwith equipped herself with duster and feather brush, and set to work to make her corner of the large room as neat as Winifred’s.
This was not altogether feasible, since Winifred’s idea of neatness and hers did not quite coincide. For instance, every Monday, for the last year, at least, Polly had registered a vow that she would set herself the task of mending the old rug by her bedside before another week came round, but the days slipped by somehow, and the rug’s shabbiness became more and more enforced; it was, in fact, as shabby as it could be. Polly gazed at it this morning with a touch of shame.
“I think I will do it now. I can darn it with some of that crewel wool, and I shall at least preserve my neck, if not the original pattern.”
With Polly, sudden suggestions meant operations. She sat down on the floor cross-legged, and pulled the once valuable rug on her knees.
“I shall ask father to give me a new one for my Christmas present,” Polly observed, as she sorted out the nearest shade in her wools to cover over the jagged hole.
Winifred rubbed at her few silver ornaments a moment or two in silence.
“If I were you, I don’t think I would say much about a Christmas present this year,” she observed, after a little while, as she made the top of her old salts bottle gleam like a mirror beneath her industrious leather.
Polly looked up.
When Polly looked upward with her strange gray-green eyes she had the most bewitching air in the world.