“I should like to see how I look in a fine dress. I never had one in my life.”
“Fy, Miss Barry,” cried the maid; but Molly persisted in her assertion.
“Well, it’s very becoming to you, anyway,” said Agnes, carefully adjusting the graceful demi-train with its embroidered flounces.
She had tied Mollie’s refractory dark curls back from her peach-bloom cheeks with a new rose-pink ribbon, and fastened a bunch of pink roses in with the lace of her square corsage. The round dimpled arms, bare to the elbows, were faultless in shape and contour as they escaped from their soft ruffles.
“You look very nice,” continued Agnes, critically.
“Thank you; but I feel like a peacock,” said the girl, with such ludicrous strut across the floor that the maid burst out laughing.
“Miss Barry, you haven’t got a bit of dignity. You’re just like a child!” she exclaimed. “But go, now, to your aunt. You know how impatient she is.”
Molly laughed; but she went along the hall quite sedately and down the stairs, pausing only once to take a gratified peep at herself in the mirror of the tall hatrack opposite the parlor door.
“I do look nice,” she said, nodding at the radiant reflection, and a sudden thought came to her. She muttered:
“I wish he could see me now, the hateful prig! I know I did look like a tramp that night.”