“You will give them to me?” said Betty. “But where did you get them from?”
“That don’t matter a bit. Don’t you ask any questions and you will hear no lies. I will give them to you, and nobody and nothing shall ever take them from you again, if you do something for me.”
“What’s that, Miss Pen?”
“Will you, Betty—will you? And will you be awful quick about it.”
“I should like to have them,” said Betty. “There’s a friend of mine going to commit marriage, and that tidy would suit her down to the ground. She’d like it beyond anything. But, all the same, I don’t hold with young ladies forcing their way into my kitchen; it’s not haristocratic.”
“Never mind that ugly word. Will you do what I want?”
“What is it, Miss Pen?”
“Palefy me. Make me sort of refined. Take the color out of me. Bleach me—that’s it. I want to go to the seaside. Pale people go; rosy people don’t. I want to be awful pale by to-night. How can it be done? It’s more genteel to be pale.”
“It is that,” said Betty, looking at the rosy Penelope with critical eyes. “I have often fretted over my own color; it’s mostly fixed in the nose, too. But I don’t know any way to get rid of it.”
“Don’t you?” said Penelope.