CHAPTER XX
“YES,” said Tiny to Lee that night, “you are lovely—perfectly lovely: but it should have been white. I think it was quite weak of us to give way. No girl ever made her début in black before.”
“That’s why I wanted to—that, and because it’s so becoming. Why should I wear a silly little white frock just because it’s the custom?”
“The more you make yourself like other people, dear, the easier time you will have in this world.”
Lee tossed her head. “I’m going to have my own way in my own way,” she announced.
She was dressed for her party, in black gauze. Mrs. Montgomery had wept at the bare suggestion. Tiny had expressed herself with unusual emphasis, and Coralie, who expected to be a vision in white, had remonstrated until Lee had fallen asleep.
Lee had an instinct for dress. She knew that she would look superb in black, and merely sweet and pretty in white. She had chosen a gauze as blue-black as her hair, and ordered it to be made with a light simplicity which increased her clean length of limb and threw into sharp relief the dazzling white of her skin. She wore her hair brushed away from her face and knotted at the back of her head.
“I may not be a great beauty,” she remarked, “but I am stunning!”
“You are a symphony in black and blue; and white and pink; your eyes are so very blue in that dress, and your hair, and brows, and lashes seem so much blacker than usual—one almost forgets even your complexion. You are despairingly pretty.”
Tiny looked placidly pretty in pink and white.