"Do you think red hair is so awful ugly?"
And what a wondrous glory of hair it was! It was so intensely black; and then it had that singular fringe of fire, or touch of Titian color, which seen in the sunset made it almost red.
The man stops, turns, comes back a step or two, as she continues:
"I do—I do! Oh, I wish to Moses I had tow hair, I do, like Sylvia Fields."
The man is standing close beside her now. He is looking down into her face and she feels his presence. The foot does not swing so violently now, and the girl has cautiously, and, as she believes, unseen, lifted the edge of her tattered sleeve to her eyes. "Why Carrie, your hair is not red." And he speaks very tenderly. "Carrie, you are going to be beautiful. You are beautiful now. You are very beautiful!"
Carrie is not so angry now. The foot stops altogether, and she lifts her face and says:
"No I ain't—I ain't beautiful! Don't you try to humbug me. I am ugly, and I know it! For, last winter, when I went down to the grocery to fetch Forty-nine—he'd gone down there to get medicine for his ager, Mr. John Logan—I heard a man say, 'She is ugly as a mud fence.' Oh, I went for him! I made the fur fly! But that didn't make me pretty. I was ugly all the same. No, I'm not pretty—I'm ugly, and I know it!"
"Oh, no, you're not. You are beautiful, and getting lovelier every day." Carrie softens and approaches him.
"Am I, John Logan? And you really don't think red hair is the ugliest thing in the world?"
"Do I really not think red hair is the ugliest thing in the world? Why, Carrie?"