"Oh, Justin," she whispered as she looked. "Oh, Justin, Justin!" She put out her hands as if for all their capable strength they felt the need of a comforting touch. And then the amiable young face smiling back at her, blurred before her wet appealing eyes.
CHAPTER IX
A DAY TO HERSELF
Persis had resolved on a new gown.
The livelier iris which in spring changes on the burnished dove, reveals nature's universal tactics. On looking over her wardrobe after her day at the Hornblower farm, Persis had been appalled by its manifest shortcomings. The black mohair, held to the light, betrayed an unmistakable greenish tinge. The navy blue was long since out of style. As for the wine-colored henrietta, it had never been becoming. The material had been presented Persis by a customer who had unexpectedly gone into mourning, and she had made it up and worn it with much the emotion of an old-time penitent in his hair-cloth shirt. And yet in twenty-four hours the mohair had not become perceptibly greener nor was the blue more strikingly passée. It was Persis herself who had changed.
As she stood before the mirror, fitting her own lining, she defended her course as the wisest women will do, though when judge, jury and advocate are all one, the verdict is a foregone conclusion. She tightened the seam under her arm, used the scissors discreetly here and there, and continued to argue the point, though there was none who had a right to question or to criticize.
"It's bad policy for a dressmaker to go around shabby. It's like a doctor with an invalid wife and sickly children. And anyway, I haven't had anything new for over a year, unless I count that blue chambray wrapper. As little as I spend on clothes, I guess when I do want a new gown it's nobody's business."
The argument was plausible, convincing. Any listener who had been on the point of accusing Persis of extravagance, must have humbly acknowledged his mistake and begged her pardon. But Persis had a harder task than to convince an outsider that she needed an addition to her wardrobe. She was striving, and without success, to alter her own uneasy conviction that the prospective visit of Justin Ware was responsible for her novel and engrossing interest in her personal appearance.
Persis, studying her reflection in the mirror, directed the point of the scissors toward her throat as if deliberating suicide. "I wonder," she mused, "how 'twould look to have it turn away at the neck in a V. 'Tisn't as if I was sixty."
The scissors, obedient to the suggestion, snipped a cautious line directly beneath Persis' chin. The cambric was folded back to give the desired V-effect, and Persis' countenance assumed an expression of complacence altogether justifiable. Then at this most inopportune moment, Joel entered.