Miss Baron felt for the moment as if she could have pounced upon the child and spanked her. But she noticed how one curl fell outside her ear, and how the eyes and voice were profoundly earnest, and how the attitude was eloquent of a kind of repentance before the fact.
And so she said: “Won’t you do something for me that will please me better than anything else I can think of—something that will take only a minute?”
Bonnie May looked at her meditatively—and then began to laugh quite riotously! “You don’t look the part!” she gurgled in justification.
“What part, please?” The question was put somewhat blankly.
“You’re talking like a—oh, a Lady Clare, and you haven’t even got your shoes buttoned up!”
Miss Baron slowly regarded her shoes; then her glance travelled calmly to Bonnie May; then she rather dully inspected the dress that lay across her knees. Her countenance had become inscrutable. She turned away from the guest’s scrutiny, and after a moment she arose slowly and left the room, carrying the dress with her.
She did not stop to define her feelings. She was wounded, but she felt sharp resentment, and she was thinking rebelliously that she was in no degree responsible for Bonnie May. Still ... her sense of justice stayed her. She had the conviction that the child’s remark, if inexcusably frank, was a fair one. And it had been made so joyously!
However, she meant to go to her mother with a request to be excused from any further humiliation as Bonnie May’s handmaiden. But before she had proceeded half a dozen steps she began to fear even greater disaster, if Mrs. Baron should undertake to be the bearer of the rejected dress.
It would be a victory worth working for, if she could overcome the fastidious guest’s prejudice.
She went to her room and carefully buttoned her shoes and made other improvements in her toilet. Then she went back into Bonnie May’s presence.