“Occasionally,” agreed the Colonel, nodding darkly.
“So I don’t know so very many. But I thought I’d know enough to have partners. But you never can tell. And then my hair makes me look such a fright. I might have had more partners if it had been longer.”
She passed a small hand, which he noticed was rough and red, over her cropped crown, ruffling the short locks on her forehead.
“How—how did it come to be so?” he asked, looking at it with admiration tinged with curiosity.
“I’ve been sick. I was very sick last winter with a fever, and so in April when I was getting better they cut it all off. We had a bad winter up here, it was so terribly wet. I never saw anything worse; our house leaked all over.”
“It was a wet winter,” he assented. “And I heard it was a good deal worse up here than it was down below.”
“It was dreadful. The rains were so heavy even in March that a big piece of land near where we live slid down. Where it used to be just a slope it’s now like a precipice. And with mother sick and all the trouble to keep things warm and dry, I got the fever. That’s why they made me come to-night—just to have a little amusement, mother said, because I’d had such a hard winter. And we made this dress—” she touched the skirt with a hand that betrayed a conscious feminine satisfaction in her apparel—“it’s some stuff mother had, very good stuff. We couldn’t have afforded to buy anything like it, and I don’t think you could here at Foleys. But we did spend something. These flowers—” she indicated two bunches of artificial red roses at her neck and belt—“we bought them. They were a dollar; fifty cents each bunch.”
She touched the bunch at her waist with a light, arranging hand, saw something which made her brows contract and her fingers seize on the flowers and drag them hurriedly away from their resting place. Where they had been a red stain—dye from the cheap leaves—disfigured her dress.
She stared at it for a moment, and then looked up at the Colonel in blank, heart-stricken dismay.
“Why, look what they’ve done,” she faltered.