“Why don’t you try it on yourself?” said Nan. “I bet yours will come off, all right.”
Judith dipped her fingers in the jar and daubed her glowing cheek with the cleansing cream. Everybody laughed. “And now while 117 we leave this cream on for a minute or two I will endeavor to interest you in my various powders.” She gave an animated recommendation of powders from talcum to insect.
“And now we will see the miraculous powers of the cleansing cream.” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and after a vigorous rubbing of the anointed cheek submitted the evidence to the audience.
“That is excellent,” said Mrs. Bucknor. “Let me have a jar.”
Next Judith demonstrated the virtues of a vanishing cream and made several sales. Then the men must be told of an excellent shaving soap and healing powder. Scented soaps of all kinds were then displayed, shampoos, hair tonics, pocket combs, tooth brushes and paste.
The lassitude which had held the house party in thrall was dispelled. It was almost as though Judith had applied a cleansing fluid to the atmosphere. She stood in their midst, displaying her wares with an earnestness and simplicity that was most convincing. Who could help but buy from the girl?
Miss Ann looked at her long and searchingly. So this was the girl that old Billy thought resembled his mistress. Her thoughts went back to her girlhood. When she was the age of this 118 Judith could she have so demeaned herself as to go around peddling cosmetics and soaps? Certainly not! She would have starved before she would have stooped to such an occupation. Starved! What did she know about starving? The morning she had gone away from Cousin Betty Throckmorton’s without her breakfast was the first time in her life she had ever missed a meal. Visitors in the blue-grass regions of Kentucky are not apt to be hungry. Would it have been better if, when she was young and strong, she, too, had endeavored to help herself instead of visiting, eternally visiting?
All of this flashed through the old lady’s mind. Suppose there had been no cousins and aunts and uncles to visit—what then? Suppose she had been as this girl was, with no relations on whom she might depend for assistance. Suppose her relations had been poor. Suppose they had not wanted her. Not wanted her! Did they want her? Did anybody want her? So intently did she gaze on Judith’s face that the girl’s eyes were drawn in the direction of the old lady. Miss Ann would have liked to buy some of the toilet articles, but the quarterly allowance from her small estate was not due for many days and never was there money enough for her to indulge herself in the kind of wares 119 Judith offered for sale. For a moment Judith stopped her salesman’s patter and gazed into the eyes of Cousin Ann Peyton.
“Poor old lady!” was her thought. “It must be terrible to be old and idle. I wish I could do something for her just to let her know I like her. I believe I might even love her.”
The sales had been larger than Judith in her fondest dreams had imagined they could be. Even the scornful Mildred purchased a few things that took her fancy and the young men, one and all, remembered they were sadly in need of shaving cream and tooth brushes, or if they were not in immediate need it was just as well to lay in a supply. There was much laughing and talking and badinage, but through it all Judith held herself with a certain poise that gave all of the buyers to understand that she was merely the store-keeper and did not wish to be regarded in any other light.