I did mind, but I knew I oughtn’t.
My mother raised my head and adjusted the bow on one of my skimpy little pigtails. She looked as she did sometimes after my Aunt Emma had just gone.
'We’ll see if you can have a slip. What color would you like—supposing you can?'
'Pink,' I answered promptly, 'like my best hair-ribbons.'
Pink china silk was bought. When I tried it under the Persian lawn it matched the ribbons exactly. I jiggled up and down on my toes—my only way of expressing great joy.
The dress, when my mother was not working on it, lay in the spare room on the bed. I made countless pilgrimages to the spare room. Once I slipped the dress on by myself. I wanted to see how I looked. But the mirror of the spare-room bureau was very small; so I inserted a hair-brush. With the mirror tipped I could see quite all of me—only I didn’t see quite all. I didn’t see my freckles, or my jaw, or my very thin legs. I saw a glory of pink and white, and I grinned from sheer rapture.
The spare room had no heat: there was a register, but unless we had company the register was closed. My mother found me one day kneeling by the bed, shivering, but in ecstatic contemplation of my dress, which I had not dared to try on a second time. She gave me ginger tea. I gulped it down meekly. I felt even then that as a punishment ginger tea is exquisitely relevant. It chastens the soul but at the same time it warms the stomach you’ve allowed to get cold.
I had been very much afraid that before the night of the entertainment,—it was to be given the twenty-third of December,—something would surely happen to my dress or to me; but the night arrived and both were in a perfect state of preservation. To expedite matters, as the Sunday school was to assemble at a quarter past seven, my mother dressed me before supper. Just as the last button was fastened, we heard footsteps on the front porch.
'There, Martha! Go show your father.'
I ran down into the hall and took up my position in the centre of it; but when I heard the key turn in the latch of the inside door I wanted to run away and hide. I had never felt so beautiful.