"I'll put her into the car, Van," offered Mr. Farraday. "They need you here in this fight."
And again his author was snatched out of Mr. Vandeford's clutches.
Several hours later a very interesting scene was enacted in two tiny adjoining rooms under the roof of the Y. W. C. A., with Miss Adair and Miss Lindsey as the principals.
"If you take away all that net there won't be any waist left to the dress. Don't!" pleaded Miss Adair, as Miss Lindsey stood over her with determined scissors.
"I'm making it absolutely perfect, and you can't tell by looking down on it. You'll have to trust me," answered Miss Lindsey, with pins in her mouth, as she snipped away a funny little tucker of common new net with which Miss Elvira Henderson of Adairville, Kentucky, had for the sake of her spinster convictions ruined a triumph she had accomplished directly out of "Feminine Fashions" and the ancestral trunk.
"Will it be—be modest?" demanded Miss Adair.
"A lot more modest than having that ugly mosquito netting telling everybody that you are not willing to have them see your marvelous neck and arms except through its meshes. Nobody will think you know you've got 'em, if you show them like everybody else; but they'll think you think you are a peep-show if you cover them half up." And as she spoke Miss Lindsey gave another daring rip and snip. Her philosophy struck home.
"That's every word true," agreed Miss Adair, with relief. "I'll just forget about my skin there, as I do about that on my face and hands and nobody will notice me at all."
"That's it. Skin is no treat to New York, and nobody will look at you twice." Miss Lindsey had a struggle to keep her voice and manner unconcerned enough, as she surveyed her finished product and saw that from under her hands would go forth a sensation. In the old ivory satin with its woven rosebuds and cream rose-point, above which rose pearly shoulders and a neck bearing a small, proud head, with close waves of heavy black hair, Miss Adair was like a dainty, luscious, tropical fruit that is more beautiful than its own flower. "How an old maid in a country town made that dress I don't see!" Miss Lindsey added reflectively.
"It was you, who unmade it," answered Miss Adair with gratitude. "I wish you were going, too," she added as she nestled to the taller girl for a perfumed second.