Putting on the lip stuff was more serious. It took both courage and invention to find out how to do that, and the girl with the inhuman pallor was not sure at all that she was coming anywhere near the mark.
“I know how to do the cheeks,” she decided, “for we had lots of paint on at the last school play.” With that assurance she described a red circle, then a full moon on each cheek, ending with a dab on her chin. She had seen someone do that.
“Of course Hazel only does this when she sings, I suppose,” Gloria was charitable enough to guess. “But I should think she would have to take lessons to learn how to apply all that stuff; like a landscape.”
The tiny brushes for the eyebrows she put aside without attempting to apply them to her naturally long, curly lashes, and when she finally had her hair puffed out at the ears, and turned up at the back and finished the coiffeur with a great belt pin, she gazed at the girl in the mirror with wonder and fascination.
“I don’t blame them,” she was thinking. “It’s wonderful to look like somebody else.”
From its own particular hook she slipped the most gorgeous coral velveteen robe, evidently Hazel was not allowed to take such finery to boarding school, for this was too pretty to relinquish, otherwise. The dark flash in Gloria’s eyes responded beautifully to the glow of the coral, and with her own slippers—the red felts Jane had given her, she capered around, swishing her long sash and doing a dance not yet done publicly. It was original, and decidedly novel, to say the least. She was having a wonderful time, forgot all her loneliness and almost forgot it was Sunday. After all, it is the best gift of Heaven to be a girl, to be able to forget trouble, and to have hope so imbedded in one’s nature that nothing short of Heaven’s own weapons can crush it.
“If only Millie could see me,” mused Gloria.
Then she thought of Tommy, not that she ever forgot any of her friends for long, but with the new school and its consequent companions, those out on Barbend seem quite a distant away from her.
Very carefully she switched on the light. Everything looked better in the electric glow, and now she tried several new poses. She liked the coral velveteen, she liked her hair high, and she liked the “canned complexion.” Twisting her face until her dimples cracked under the enamel, she even talked to herself in the most elegant and theatrical manner.
Suddenly she heard a commotion downstairs. Her plight dawned upon her with something of a shock.