"How do you know when you're a young lady?" asked Roberta Grey.
She was sitting before the ancient mahogany dressing-table in her—and Wythie's—room, unblushingly regarding herself in the mirror, while the fingers of both hands, supporting her brilliant face, experimented with changes in it by pushing up the delicate eyebrows into quite a celestial angle.
Frances Silsby, from the rocking-chair by the window, and Wythie on the foot of the bed, laughed.
"I know I'm young by the record in the Bible—and by the way I feel," said Frances. "And I know I'm a lady by the company I keep, since 'birds of a feather,' and so forth." Frances made a deep salaam almost to the floor, taking advantage of the forward tilt of the rocking-chair to deepen it.
"That's the retort courteous, Francie. You will be an ornament to the diplomatic circle when you are Lady Ambassadress to the court of St. James'. But I should like to know how to be sure one's reluctant feet have crossed the meeting point of the brook and the river," insisted Rob.
"Lady Ambassadress, Rob?" hinted Oswyth. "You don't think that is tautological, do you? You know in 'Rudder Grange' they never noticed that Pomona had grown up until a young man walked home with her one night, and loitered at the gate; perhaps that's the test," added Wythie slyly. Bruce Rutherford had come down with Rob from Frances' the previous night alone, and not with Basil and Bartlemy to bear them company, as usual, hence Wythie's suggestion had a personal application.
"If one had to put on shoes and stockings, for instance, after she ceased to stand where the brook and river meet, she would know that she had waded in and had come out on the other side, a young lady," Rob went on with slightly heightened colour, ignoring her sister. "That's it; I have it!" she cried, wheeling around to look at her audience outside the glass. "It is something of the sort—it's the hair! I am just eighteen, but I wear my hair in a braid, with a big bow where it is turned up on the top of my head. If I discarded that bow, and made a great soft knot of hair 'on the top of my head, in the place where the wool ought to grow'"—Rob chanted this direct quotation—"I should be a young lady! I think I'll do it!"
She jumped up, snatched a kimono from a hook in the closet, threw it over her shoulders, dropped back into her chair before the dressing-table and in a twinkling had the pins out of her braid; the bow, badge of young girlhood, thrown on the table, and her rebellious, red-brown hair tumbling about her slender shoulders in a mass of beautiful colour.
"Wythie is already done up, and Frances, too. I have been wondering why they seemed so much more the real thing than I did, and I never discovered till now," said Rob, speaking with difficulty as she sat, head almost touching her lap, gathering her wealth of locks into her hand. "Now, I am going to take my place among my peers," she added, righting herself, displaying crimson cheeks as she faced the glass, and twisting and coaxing her hair to the crown of her head. "You shall see me in my true dignity henceforth. Won't it be pathetic, when the fashion-books come and Mardy has no longer any interest in those charming pages headed: Styles for Young Girls? Thank goodness, there is Prue still, but even she is sixteen, and that means her hours are numbered. I didn't want to grow up, and I mean to italicize the young in my title of young lady just as long as I can, but I think I'm grown up. There, will that do?"