“My finest things aren’t fine enough to make much difference,” said Jan, who had not had her own eyes shut to facts since she came. “However, I’ll do my best not to disgrace you, Gwen.”
Together they fastened Jan into the light-blue cashmere which her mother had made for her to wear to possible children’s parties with her cousins. Jan could not help smiling at herself in the glass, while Gwen was buttoning up the waist in the back, remembering this, and what was Gladys’s idea of a party, and how little she considered herself a child at thirteen.
“You really look like peaches and cream with that light blue against your skin,” said Gwen admiringly when the task was completed. “They can’t say you’re not awfully pretty.”
“Don’t flatter, Gwen. And imagine a brown maid peaches and cream! Come on, then. Have you any instructions to give as to manners?” asked Jan.
“No,” said Gwen wisely. “Yours are always nice, because you’re so real and unaffected—not that there’s the least hope of their knowing that simplicity is nice, though.”
“My cousin, Miss Howe; Miss Hammond, Miss Ida Hammond, Miss Gilsey,” said Gladys, doing the honors with unusual dignity because she felt sure it would be needed to cover Jan’s deficiencies in worldly knowledge.
Janet murmured her salutations confusedly, badly handicapped at the start by the formality of so many “misses” when she expected to be introduced all round by first names.
“How do you like New York, Miss Howe?” asked Daisy Hammond, estimating Jan’s gown rapidly but accurately. “It must be very different from the West?”
“Yes, but I like it,” said Jan warily.
“New York is so much bigger,” added Ida Hammond, with a trying air of superiority.