There was a white China silk, with belt and shoulder-knots of black velvet; a white Japanese crepe, with purple lilacs strewed over its surface, and frills of violet ribbon for ornament; a Christmas dress of soft, white camel's hair, with bands of white-fox fur round the slightly pointed neck and elbow-sleeves; and, last of all, a Quaker gown of silver-gray nun's cloth, with a surplice and full undersleeves of white crêpe-lisse.
"I 'm going to be vain, Mrs. Bird!" cried Polly, with compunction in her voice. "I 've never had a real beautiful, undyed, un-made-over dress in my whole life, and I shall never have strength of character to own four at once without being vain!"
This speech was uttered through the crack of the library door, outside of which Polly stood, gathering courage to walk in and be criticised.
"Think of your aspiring nose, Sapphira!" came from a voice within.
"Oh, are you there too, Edgar?"
"Of course I am, and so is Tom Mills. The news that you are going to 'try on' is all over the neighborhood! If you have cruelly fixed the age limit so that we can't possibly get in to the performances, we are going to attend all the dress rehearsals. Oh, ye little fishes! what a seraphic Sapphira! I wish Tony were here!"
She was pretty, there was no doubt about it, as she turned around like a revolving wax figure in a show-window, and assumed absurd fashion-plate attitudes; and pretty chiefly because of the sparkle, intelligence, sunny temper, and vitality that made her so magnetic.
Nobody could decide which was the loveliest dress, even when she had appeared in each one twice. In the lilac and white crepe, with a bunch of dark Parma violets thrust in her corsage, Uncle Jack called her a poem. Edgar asserted openly that in the Christmas toilet he should like to have her modeled in wax and put in a glass case on his table; but Mrs. Bird and Tom Mills voted for the Quaker gray, in which she made herself inexpressibly demure by braiding her hair in two discreet braids down her back.
"The dress rehearsal is over. Good-night all!" she said, as she took her candle. "I will say 'handsome is as handsome does' fifty times before I go to sleep, and perhaps--I only say perhaps--I may be used to my beautiful clothes in a week or two, so that I shall be my usual modest self again."
"Good-night, Polly," said the boys; "we will see you to-morrow."