“What, then?”
“Why, accordion-pleated automobile coats,” teased Dorothy.
“Of course! With such dainty white lingerie! Wouldn’t Nat and Ned look swell in such coats!”
“Well, if you insist, Tavia, I shall give you my real opinion—memoirs of the fantails, as it were. They looked exactly like star chorus girls. But I was loathe to bring up such thoughts in your presence. Yet, those birds were the purest white—”
“Oh, how I shall miss them! I just enjoyed coming down here every morning to see them,” and Tavia very gently picked up two of the doves, placed one on each of her shoulders, and then proceeded to walk “around the ring,” doing a trick she called “The Winged Venus.”
But there was very little of the Venus type about Tavia. It was rather early in the morning, and her hair had as yet only received the “fire alarm brush,” which meant that Tavia, upon hearing the breakfast bell, had smuggled her brown hair into a most daring knot, promising to do it up properly later. But it was at breakfast that Dorothy’s two cousins, Ned and Nat, told of their loss—that the pigeons had been stolen during the night. The boys made no attempt to hide either their anger at the unknown thieves’ act, or their genuine grief at the loss of their fine birds. Dorothy and Tavia were almost as wrought up over the affair as were the boys, and, as a matter of fact, very little breakfast was partaken of by any of the quartette that morning. So Tavia did not get back to her room to give the “back tap” to the “fire alarm” hair dressing, and as she now marched around the chicken yard, with the doves on her shoulders, proclaiming herself to be the Winged Venus, Dorothy suggested it might be well to do away with the Psyche knot at the back of her head first, and not get her mythology so hopelessly mixed.
Over in a grassy corner Dorothy was feeding from her hands the bantams. She looked like a “living picture,” for a pretty girl feeding chicks always looks like something else, a page from fairy tales, or a colored plate from Mother Goose.
Tavia had always complained that Dorothy “didn’t have to do” her hair, she only had to “undo it,” for the blonde waves had a way of nestling in very close at night, only to be shaken out the next morning. So Dorothy’s hair looked pretty, and her simple white gown was smooth, not wrinkled like Tavia’s, for Dorothy’s dress couldn’t wrinkle, the stuff was too soft to hold creases. Tavia wore a pink muslin slip—it was intended to be worn as an underslip, with a thin lace or net covering, but like other things Tavia had cut her dressing down that morning, so she wore the slip without the cover. And to add to the “misery,” the pink slip was a mass of wrinkles—it had been making itself comfortable in a little lump on Tavia’s bedroom chair all the night, and so was not quite ready (copying its mistress) to be on parade in the morning sunlight.
“Here come the boys,” suddenly announced Dorothy, as two youths strode down the path toward the little enclosure.
“Hello there!” called Ned. “What’s the entrance?”