“Doesn’t it seem six years since last June, when we were all flying around, and mamma was getting ready to go to Europe?” said Cricket on the last night at the house in town. “Seems to me I was such a little girl then.”
Indeed, Cricket, as well as Eunice, had grown much older in the last year, and was more responsible and self-reliant in every way. Both girls had grown tall, Cricket especially, for she had shot up within half an inch of Eunice this winter.
Cricket was very proud of this, and was hugely delighted when people took her to be Eunice’s twin, as they quite often had of late. But her curly hair was getting to be a great grievance, as it still tumbled about her shoulders, and wouldn’t grow long.
“Do you suppose my hair will always stay short and curly?” she asked, anxiously. She was sitting perched on her father’s knee. The younger children were in bed, and the others were all in the back parlour. The furniture was in its summer dress of brown holland, the pictures had retired behind mosquito nets, and everything wore a shut-up-for-the-summer expression, except the family.
“Just think how I’ll look when I’m eighty,” went on Cricket, in an aggrieved tone, “going about with little flippy-floppy curls all over my head, like old Mrs. Crazy-Beecher, round on Jones Street. Don’t you know how her curls always jiggle up and down, because she nods all the time like a Chinese mandolin?”
“Mandarin, dear. Yes. You might wear a wig then,” suggested mamma.
“Ugh! I’d hate to wear store hair.”
“Did you hear Kenneth’s latest? He watched Eliza this morning putting on that funny jute braid she wears, and it seemed to strike him for the first time, so he said, ‘’Liza, what makes you wear cloth hair? Mamma doesn’t.’”
“I don’t want cloth hair, either,” said Cricket, decidedly. “Papa, can’t anything be done to straighten my curls out? Couldn’t you give me some medicine for it? I’d like to put it up in plaster of Paris. Wouldn’t that do it? It straightened out the little Smith boy’s leg.”
“We might put your mind up in plaster of Paris, to take some of the kinks out of that,” observed Donald.