"But I'm so lonely except when I'm at school," said Alma sadly.
Dot opened her eyes. She was just slipping her blue frock carefully over her shining curly head, but she stopped with her head half through to wonder at Alma.
"Lonely!" she said. "Here! In this house! And you've got your father and mother!"
Alma shook her head dolefully.
"Father is always busy," she said, "and mother is always out—or entertaining. Oh, Thea, I would love to have you for my very own sister. I would give everything I have if I could have you."
Dorothea smiled kindly. Mona Parbury had told her the same—and Minnie Stevenson, and Nellie Harden. They all wanted her for their very own sister. It was only such little madcaps as her own sisters, Betty and Nancy, who were indifferent.
Alma was small and undeveloped. She was seventeen and looked hardly fifteen. Her large dark eyes looked pathetic in her thin sallow face. Her lips were thin and colourless, her hair straight and dull brown. No prettiness at all belonged to her. Only wistfulness and gentleness.
So they went shopping together, the two little girls in blue. And they had no chaperon at all with them, no schoolmistress, or governess, or mother, or aunt—no one to direct their eyes where they should look, and their smiles when they should be given out and when withheld. No one to carry the purse.
Dot had two shillings and sixpence halfpenny in her small worn purse. Her mother had slipped the money in. "I can't bear for you to be without money, Dot dear," she had said, "but try your best not to spend it."
Alma's purse seemed full of half-crowns and shillings and sixpences!