“George Pogany! of course she does. She’s worn them for more than two years now. She has to, of course. Anyone as fat as Betty has to wear corsets,” declared Miss Pogany.
“Not if I know it,” he retorted indignantly. “Betsey, as soon as you have eaten your breakfast you go straight upstairs and take off those corsets, and don’t you ever let me hear of your wearing any such foolish things again until you are eighteen years old. Do you understand?”
“Yes, father,” said Betty, “and like as not you won’t hear of it even when I’m eighteen.”
An hour after breakfast, as George Pogany, dressed in his Sunday clothes, sat stiffly by the window waiting to accompany his sister and daughter to church, Betty stole up behind him, put her arms about his neck, and shyly kissed him.
“You’re so good, father,” she said softly. “I am so happy because you don’t mind my braiding my hair and—not being so grown-up.”
She slipped out shyly. George Pogany’s heart beat quickly. He couldn’t remember that his only child had come to him thus and kissed him since she had been a toddling baby. Something strange seemed to have taken place. Instead of the big, overgrown daughter he had been secretly rather ashamed of, he seemed to have seen this morning the little girl she would naturally have been at her age. And pretty, too, she was, surprisingly pretty—touchingly so, in truth, to George Pogany, though he didn’t realize it. He couldn’t understand it at all, nor why his throat seemed husky. But in any event, the practical hardware merchant came to a practical conclusion. He had already looked ahead to the autumn when Betty would enter the high school at Paulding with her class with two railroad fares a day to be paid; and he had decided that to the weekly total of ninety cents she should contribute the twenty-five cents she had for pin money. Now he said to himself that he would pay her fares and she should have her allowance for hair-ribbons or sweets. And perhaps, being in the high school, she ought to have it increased.
CHAPTER VII
MRS. PHILLIPS rushed into her brother’s room in unwonted excitement. “Humphrey, look quick! Bouncing Bet is going by, and—will you see her! Did you ever see the like of that?”
“I saw her Monday morning, Isabel,” Meadowcroft returned quietly. “And I have noticed her a number of times since. It is certainly a singular change. It’s a genuine transformation.”
“Rather a pity, it seems to me,” Mrs. Phillips rejoined a bit sharply, for she felt he approved. “She was of the real peasant type, with broad shoulders and hips and compressed waist, and might better, in my opinion, have remained true to type. Now she looks like—anyone.”