“When you were little, Betty, and your mother was living, she used to tie the bow behind. I remember how it hung down as far as some little scallops that edged the bottom of your little white dress,” he remarked, his harsh voice pitched low. “Perhaps you couldn’t reach round to tie it so?”
“O yes, I can, father; I can reach anywhere now! I’ll change it so before church,” the girl declared.
“Church,” echoed Miss Pogany. “Church! Don’t think you’ll be allowed to go to church looking like that, young lady. I’d be ashamed to have you step outside the door, such a fright as you are. I shouldn’t like you to go as far as the hen-coop.”
Betty was as much amazed by her own boldness as she was by her father’s attitude, though later she realized that the former depended upon the latter. She seemed now to be listening to some other girl speaking in cool determined accents.
“O, I’ll change and wear my good skirt, but I have shortened that, too,” she said. “And I’m always going to wear my hair down. It feels so much better, and father likes it.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what’s come over you, Betty Pogany!” gasped Aunt Sarah. “It’s perfectly disgraceful! Tell me, George, are you going to allow that impudent girl to go to church with her clothes almost up to her knees and without her corsets?”
Pogany’s face was transfixed with horror.
“Bless my heart! Whatever have you been doing, Betty?”
“Corsets!” he echoed hoarsely. “Do you mean to tell me, Sarah, that my daughter wears corsets—and she only twelve years old! I never heard the like!”