"O Richard, O mon roi," I carolled this morning, but I confess that I carolled it as much in an undertone as the unfortunate aristocrats had to employ when they chose to give vent to their feelings by singing that song during the Reign of Terror.
I was up-stairs in my own room at Cousin Eunice's, brushing, shaking, smoothing, folding, and now and then mending a little ripped place in my clothes, for, during the last four weeks I have done nothing but wear them. Early in the morning, all through the day, and late at night, I have lived to maltreat those clothes. And they are showing signs of being weary and wounded.
It is a good thing, possibly, that mother and Cousin Eunice would not let me have the black spangled net that my soul yearned for, else there would not have been a spangle left to tell the tale by this time.
Cousin Eunice was in the next room throughout the time I was thus employed—that is, she was in and out, hence the undertone in my singing.
"Ann," she finally called in a vexed tone, after a period of silence, "you'll live to learn, after you're married, that a man and his poll-tax receipt are soon parted."
"It's a registration certificate," I amended softly.
"Well, what if it is? It's eternally lost when they want it."
She had spent the morning emptying bureau drawers, scratching through piles of old papers, peering under the clock, into a cracked vase, moving the piano and searching in the dusty lint beneath, and dazzling her eyesight by a scramble through a five-years' accumulation of pink electric light bills—but no sign of the registration certificate. Toward luncheon time Rufe called her up and said he hoped she had not put herself to any trouble, for he forgot to tell her early this morning that he had already found the missing paper in his pocket-book.
"They have to register before they can vote, don't they?"
I knew that they did, but I was in a mood to talk politics this morning.