“Of course,” Miss Carrie had said, “you will not fail to be on time.” And Miss Carrie had used her deepest tones.
Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou had wondered how she could even dream of such a thing.
It was not two o’clock, and the three stood at the gate, the first to return.
They were in the same piece. It was The Play. In a play one did more than suit the action to the word, one dressed to suit the part.
In the play Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou found themselves the orphaned children of a soldier who had failed to return from the war. It was a very sad piece. Sadie had to weep, and more than once Emmy Lou had found tears in her own eyes, watching her.
Miss Carrie said Sadie showed histrionic talent. Emmy Lou asked Hattie about it, who said it meant tears, and Emmy Lou remembered then how tears came naturally to Sadie.
When Aunt Cordelia heard they must dress to suit the part she came to see Miss Carrie, and so did the mamma of Sadie and the mamma of Hattie.
“Dress them in a kind of mild mourning,” Miss Carrie explained, “not too deep, or it will seem too real, and, as three little sisters, suppose we dress them alike.”
And now Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou stood at the gate ready for the play. Stiffly immaculate white dresses, with beltings of black sashes, flared jauntily out above spotless white stockings and sober little black slippers, while black-bound Leghorn hats shaded three anxious little countenances. By the exact centre, each held a little handkerchief, black-bordered.
“It seems almost wicked,” Aunt Cordelia had ventured at this point; “it seems like tempting Providence.”