So the pinspot muslin and some cheap creamy lace had been bought. Mrs. Woods and Sophie settled on a style they found illustrating an advertisement in a newspaper and which resembled a dress one of the Henty girls had worn at the race ball the year before. Maggie Grant had done all the plain sewing and Mrs. Woods the fixing and finishing touches. They had consulted over and over again about sleeves and the length of the skirt. The frock had been fitted at least a dozen times. They had wondered where they would put the lace as a bit of trimming, and had decided for frills at the elbows and a tucker in the V-shaped neck of the blouse. They marvelled at their audacity, but felt sure they had done the right thing when they cut the neck rather lower than they would have for a dress to be worn in the daytime.
Martha M'Cready, insisting on having a finger in the pie, had pressed the dress when it was finished, and she had washed and ironed Mrs. George Woods' best embroidered petticoat for Sophie to wear with it.
And now Sophie was dressing in Mrs. Woods' bedroom because it had a bigger mirror than her own room, and the three women were watching her, giving little tugs and pats to the dress now and then, measuring it with appraising glances of conscious pride in their workmanship, and joy at Sophie's appearance in it. Sophie, her face flushed, her eyes shining, turned to them every now and then, begging to know whether the skirt was not a little full here, or a little flat there; and they pinched and pulled, until it was thought nothing further could be done to improve it.
Sophie was anxious about her hair. She had put it in plaits the night before, and had kept it in them all the morning. Her hair had never been in plaits before, and she had not liked the look of it when she saw it all crisp and frizzy, like Mirry Flail's. She had used a wet brush to get the crinkle out, but there was still a suggestion of it in the heavy dark wave of her hair when she had done it up as usual.
"Your hair looks very nice—don't worry any more about it, Sophie," Martha M'Cready had said.
"My mother used to say there was nothing nicer for a young girl to wear than white muslin," Mrs. Woods remarked, "and that sash of your mother's looks real nice as a belt, Sophie."
The sash, a broad piece of blue and green silk shot like a piece of poor opal, Sophie had found in a box of her mother's, and it was wound round her waist as a belt and tied in a bow at the side.
"Turn round and let me see if the skirt's quite the same length all round, Sophie," Mrs. Grant commanded.
"Yes, Maggie," Bessie Woods exclaimed complacently. "It's quite right."
Sophie glanced at herself in the glass again. Mrs. Woods had lent her a pair of opal ear-rings, and Maggie Grant the one piece of finery she possessed—a round piece of very fine black opal set in a rim of gold, which Bill had given her when first she came to the Ridge.