"Do you think she will laugh at us, Jack?" Jean inquired, bravely. "I am sure I don't care if she does."
At least poor Jim had had a good eye for color, if the materials he had chosen for the girls' gowns were odd.
Jean's was a soft rose color, just the shade of the wild rose that covers the western prairies in the early spring and the girl smiled slightly as she looked at herself critically in the glass. The gown was becoming to her nut-brown hair and eyes and her clear, colorless skin.
Jack was dressing Frieda in a corner. "You are pretty as a picture, Jean!" she insisted. "Please don't care so much about what Laura Post may think. Come and kiss Frieda, she is sweet enough to eat."
Frieda's costume was the prettiest of the three, although it was of coarse white embroidery, such as only a man would buy. Her long blonde hair was freshly braided and tied with pale blue ribbons, and around her plump little waist was a blue sash which in color matched her eyes, sparkling now from excitement at attending her first dance. Jean marched Frieda over to a chair and held her in her lap, so that Jack could get ready to go to the reception room with them.
Jacqueline Ralston thought little about her own appearance. She probably knew she was pretty, most pretty people are aware of it, but Jack had really had so much to do and so many things to think about, that she had almost none of the vanities of most girls of sixteen. She coiled her gold-brown braids around her head in simple fashion, though she usually wore them down, as it was so difficult to keep her hair up when she was on horseback. But to-night, in honor of the party, she wished to look more grown up. Jack's hair waved from the roots to the ends and broke out all over her forehead in wayward curls and was particularly becoming to her, arranged in a simple coronet. In five minutes she had on her blue cotton crêpe gown and the three went into Mrs. Simpson's big living-room.
The room had a hardwood floor and had been charmingly decorated with evergreens, which the men had brought in from the woods at the far end of the Simpson Ranch.
"Oh, Jack, Jean, look!" Frieda suddenly gasped. A vision of fashionable loveliness swept before their girlish eyes. Miss Laura Post was crossing the room followed by her mother. Jack and Jean felt like creeping back to their bedroom, not realizing how inappropriate Laura's and her mother's costumes were for such a simple home party.
Laura was a picture and looked as if she had just stepped out of the pages of a magazine. She wore a white lace gown over silk and chiffon, trimmed in silver lace. Her hair was elaborately dressed in a bewildering mass of small, blonde puffs and around her neck a string of pearls shone softly. Mrs. Post was in violet satin, and wore a diamond crescent, which made Frieda's round eyes open wider and wider. She had never seen real diamonds, only their crystal imitations shining in the great Wyoming rocks.
For a little while Jean and Jack felt as dowdy as old rag dolls, but when the dancing began they forgot to care about their clothes. There were a number of other guests besides the house party, who had driven over to the dance, and most of them were friends of the ranch girls.