WHAT HAPPENED TO KATHIE AND LU.
It was a very great misfortune, and it must have been a sad affliction to the friends of the two children, for both were once pretty and charming.
It came about in this way.
Little Winnie Tennyson—she wasn’t the daughter of Mr. Alfred Tennyson, the poet-laureate of England, but was as sweet as any one of that gentleman’s poems—had been to the city; and she had brought home so many wondrous improvements that her two little bosom friends, Lu Medway and Kathie Dysart, were almost struck dumb to behold and to hear what Winnie said and what Winnie had.026
For one thing, there were some wooden blocks, all fluted and grooved, and Winnie could heat these blocks in the oven, and wet her hair, and lay it between them, and O! how satin-smooth the waves would be,—hair-pin-crimps and braid-crimps were nothing to this new and scientific way.
Winnie also made it a matter of pride to display her overskirts. These were arranged with ever so many tapes on the inside, and would readily tie up into the most ravishing bunches and puffs—how Lu and Kathie, wee-est mites of women though they were, did envy Winnie her tapes! Their mammas didn’t know how to loop a dress—witness their little skirts pinned back into what Kathie called a “wopse.”
She also had brought some tiny parlor skates, and, withal, many airs and graces which her two young-lady aunties had taught her, among others a funny little new accent on some of her words,—the word “pretty” in particular. And, last of all, she had been taught to dance!
“And I can show you,” Winnie said, eagerly, “’cause it goes by ‘steps,’ and uncle says I take them as pr-i-tty as Cousin Lily.”
Now, in Connaut, little girls don’t dance—not nice little girls, nor nice big girls either, for that matter.
The dimpled mouths opened in astonishment. “That is wicked, Winnie Ten’son, don’t you know?”027