"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going to wear?"
"I haven't any but the green."
"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"
Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up doesn't suit me."
"Don't you like people to like you?"
"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many people do.... And I don't think prinking helps."
"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's three fourths the battle."
Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd like to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.
Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you, Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous. "I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty, and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who you are. I wouldn't worry."
"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only preferring.—I'll wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.