“I don’t care! Have you any black hair-ribbons you could let me have, Louise? I see where I never get the honor bead for not borrowing, by the way!”
“You won’t lose it on account of my ribbons,” said Louise, “because I haven’t any. But I don’t believe hair-ribbons and your gown would match. Did you know you had a train?”
“No!” said Winona joyfully. She loved “dressing up,” and this was beginning to look very much like it. “I’ll do my hair up on top of my head, and nobody’ll think I’m younger than twenty!”
“Good!” said Louise, and helped. They wound the goldy-brown mass up on the very top, and completed the effect by hunting out a pair of plain glass eye-glasses, which Tom had brought from the ten-cent store once long ago.
“You look twenty-five anyway!” exclaimed Louise, and Winona fitted the glasses on her nose and assumed a severe expression to match. “Put your hair back off your forehead—that way.... That’s splendid!”
“I do look old!” said Winona, with a pleased expression. She trained up and down the room and looked at herself in the glass. “I’ll go down now.”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” said Louise. “Don’t wait for me.”
When Winona sailed down in her disguise to put the finishing touches to the table she found that Tom was already dressed, and was standing meekly at the head of the board. And also he had found time to decorate it.
“How do you like it?” he asked in a tone even meeker than his attitude.
Winona looked, pulled off her glasses in order to see better, looked again—and dropped down in a hopeless heap in the opposite chair. She did not say anything—the situation was beyond words.