"Well, since you've bought the shoes," said Mrs. Procter, "and probably at a very reasonable figure—" she paused, and Mr. Procter finished:
"Yes, they were only forty-eight cents, a remarkable bargain, I think."
"Remarkable," said Mrs. Procter, picking them up. "Why, I believe they're a handmade shoe! Well," she went on, "since the shoes are accounted for, I think if I have to I can quite easily manage the rest of the outfit."
Suzanna's heart sank lower. She only wondered miserably if her mother, seeing a piece of inexpensive goods of almost any shade, and finding a pattern easy to manage, would make up what she thought would do quite well for the Indian Drill costume. Then her thoughts returned to the shoes. Perhaps after all they wouldn't fit! She was enabled by that emancipating thought to turn a happier face to her father and again to thank him.
But alas, the shoes fitted perfectly.
"I think," said Suzanna desperately, "that perhaps they're a little bit too small—narrow, I mean."
"Do they hurt you?" asked her mother.
Suzanna had to confess that they didn't hurt.
"They certainly make your foot look very nice and slender," said her father.
Well, Suzanna thought miserably, she should have to wear them, and in that belief all interest in the Indian Drill left her. She simply couldn't, she felt, take her lead on the eventful day wearing those shoes. Every eye in the audience, she knew, would be fixed upon them, so different from those of the other girls, so terribly old-fashioned, as instinctively she sensed them to be.