“It will do her no harm,” she said. “Only for these young ladies and while she’s so young.”
“It’s very wrong!” cried Miss Julie. “It’s—it shouldn’t be allowed.”
“She’s engaged already. For two hours at fifty cents an hour. She needs the money and she will have to do the work for it,” the mother remarked grimly. “Go on with you, Rosaleen!”
“Get dressed!” said Miss Julie to the child. “You can pose in a costume. I’ll find something.”
She explained as well as she could to her classmates, but received no general sympathy. Most of them thought the child was awfully silly.
“And she’s made us waste half our time,” said one of them. “I’m going to complain in the office.”
Miss Julie devised a costume which she said was a gipsy dress. She went behind the screen again and found the little girl in underwaist and petticoat, buttoning up her poor, scuffed little boots.
“We’ll take those off,” she said. “You won’t mind being bare-legged.”
She dressed the little thing while it stood there like a doll. A beautiful child, too thin and altogether too small for its years, but very charmingly and gracefully built; it had deep-set clear grey eyes and a wistful small face, broad at the brow and tapering to a pointed chin, like a kitten’s. And it had about it something which enslaved Miss Julie, some mystic and adorable quality which she could not name, and which no one else saw.
She unfastened the two scrawny little “pig tails” and let her ill-kept brown hair fall about the neck, pitifully thin, like a bird’s; then she tied a broad scarlet ribbon about her forehead and put on a short spangled jacket over the underwaist. She looked very unlike a gipsy, with her meek glance and her fair skin, but she was undeniably lovely, and the class set to work drawing her without further grumbling. She was quiet as a lamb, quick to obey any suggestion, evidently anxious to atone for her naughtiness. She looked pitifully tired, too.