After awhile she got up and washed her face in cold water, and began to get ready for Maude’s guest. Naturally Maude would expect her to wear the crêpe de Chine dress she had given her aunt as a birthday present, so Miss Carter opened the cupboard door, and there it was—a dark and elegant stranger, hanging there[Pg 285] with a sort of disdainful air among the sensible, sturdy linens and cottons.
She brought it out, took off her loose, comfortable house dress, and struggled into the crêpe de Chine.
“A slip-on-dress,” Maude had called it.
“A squirm-on dress, I should say!” thought Miss Carter.
She did not like herself in that dress. She looked at her image in the mirror, and she did not like it. A sturdy little woman she was, straight as an arrow. Her face, with its small, clear, regular features and healthy color, and those very blue eyes of hers, was quite as pretty as it had been fifteen years ago—perhaps even more so, because of the patience and the compassion she had learned; but she had long ago forgotten to think about being pretty. She noted nothing except the dress, which didn’t suit her.
“Specially designed upon long, slender lines,” Maude had said.
“And I’m not!” thought Miss Carter. “What’s the sense in a dress being long and slender, if the person inside it is short and”—she paused—“and roly-poly,” she added firmly. “That’s what I am!”
She covered up all this magnificence with a big checked apron, and went down into the kitchen again. The dinners that she prepared for Maude every night were so good that it was scarcely possible to improve upon them, but this evening she intended to try. She intended to outdo herself for Maude’s Mr. Rhodes.
From the garden she picked enough early June peas to make cream-of-pea soup. The chicken, which she had intended to roast, was not, she thought, quite large enough for three, so she made it into a fricassee, with dumplings beyond description. Then she had a dish of wax beans, and a dish of asparagus, cooked to perfection and seasoned only with plenty of butter, and potatoes most marvelously fried, and she made fresh strawberry ice cream. When you consider what it meant to crack ice and turn the freezer, in that dress with long, tight sleeves and floating things that hung from the shoulders—
She didn’t dare to take it off, though, for fear of their coming by an early train, because she knew that even more than a superb dinner Maude would want to see her aunt in all her glory.