“Hazel, don’t be obstinate. I know what I am saying. Oh no, I don’t forget that I am living in a mean and sordid cottage with contemptible windows,” she cried, with an irritating shake of the head, and a querulous ring in her voice that jarred to Hazel’s heart. “I know that this room is merely what you call a parlour by construction; but the fact of your mother—your mother occupying it, my child, makes it a drawing-room. You will put on your silk dress, Hazel?”
“No, mother; I am going to put on the clean grasscloth,” said Hazel quietly. “The other would be unsuitable for the school, and the dark silk would show the dust and chalk.”
“Was ever woman troubled with such a wilful girl before!” moaned Mrs Thorne. “Oh, dear me!—oh, dea-ar me!”
She declined to be comforted, and Hazel remained obstinate absolutely refusing to go to the school in silk attire, but wearing an extremely simple, closely-fitting, grasscloth dress, with plain white collar and cuffs, and looking dreadful—so Miss Lambent afterwards said to her sister; a prejudiced statement, for if ever there was an exemplification of the proverb regarding the needlessness of foreign ornament it was in Hazel Thorne’s appearance that day.
As a rule she was disposed to be pale, but the excitement consequent upon the important event had brought the colour into her cheeks, and she looked brighter than she had for months.
Mr Chute’s flowers were on the sills of the windows, the room had been well sprinkled and swept, there was not a vestige of a cobweb to be seen, and the girls had assembled in strong force, there having been a theory in the school that an inspection meant tea and cake afterwards, a theory that Feelier Potts, basing her remarks on experience, strongly opposed; but the children mustered all the same, and in many cases suffering a good deal from hair oil, applied so that patches of their foreheads shone and invited comparison with the rest of their faces.
Mr William Forth Burge was one of the first arrivals, and he paused with his sister upon the doorstep, to unfold a clean orange silk handkerchief, and have a loud blow, like a knight of old seizing the bugle at the castle-gate.
“How nice you do look, Bill!” said little Miss Burge, smiling at him tenderly, as she raised her hand to the latch.
“Do I, Betsey! Am I all right! Do I look well!”
“Beautiful!” said Miss Burge enthusiastically. “There ain’t a wrinkle about your back, nor sides, nor nowhere.”