"Just what I said!" twittered Miss Iphigenia. "Yokes are being worn, or I'm certain Joan wouldn't have suggested it. A guimpe of black net perhaps—tucked, would you say, Joan dear!—and long wrinkled sleeves of the same. Which would do away with the necessity for long gloves, girls!"
This happy thought was greeted with acclaim. "How clever of you, Genie! We can all have guimpes and long sleeves? You see, three pairs of long white gloves—" they explained to Joan.
"Of course!" she said hastily, making a mental note to supply her cousins with long white gloves if she had to ask her step-mother for the money.
They showed her the other dresses eagerly; an amber-colored satin—"With slippers to match, my dear!"—and one of old-rose brocade which Miss Virginia almost kissed in her affection for it.
"I sometimes think if I could have had a dress like this earlier—" she murmured. "Though of course my real color, like yours, Joan, was blue. A blue sash, and a pink rose in the hair. As General Fitzhugh Lee once said to me at a Galt House ball—"
"No, wasn't it at the Governor's Inauguration, sister?" interposed Miss Euphemia.
In the gentle altercation which ensued, Joan never heard just what the gallant general had said to her cousin Virginia; but she suspected it of having some connection with blue eyes.
"You're a lucky girl to be presented at a Galt House ball!" they exclaimed presently, returning to the subject in hand. "And Cousin Effie May has really been too sweet about it. Insists, simply insists that we shall all three of us stand up with her in the receiving line! Says she'd be terribly shy without us." (Joan smiled faintly at the picture of Effie May being shy.) "We said to her, 'No, my dear, one of us is quite enough. We'll draw straws for it, as we always used to.' Dear papa never let all three of us go to the same party. As he said, 'It's too much of a good thing!' (Slang, you know.) But she assured us that she had three evening dresses she couldn't get into,"—it was Miss Euphemia speaking at the moment, quite unaware of any naïvété in the sequence of her remarks,—"and that it would be a real kindness on our part to take them off her hands. You know, dear, Cousin Effie May really is getting a little stout. And she says it's such a problem to know what to do with outgrown party dresses."
"It certainly is!" agreed Miss Iphigenia, as if it were one that weighed upon her heavily. "You simply can't give things of that sort to the poor."
"Why not?" murmured Joan, "if the poor would enjoy them?"