[CHAPTER I.]
"There is positively not a dollar left to buy a dress for Queenie and yet she will insist upon going to the ball. Could you let me have your old green silk to make over for her, Sydney?"
The small figure perched on the top of a large Saratoga trunk sprang down upon the floor, and stamped her foot so vehemently that the blue satin bow flew off from her tiny slipper.
"Wear Sydney's old green silk to the ball!" cried Queenie, indignantly. "Indeed I won't, mamma, I will stay at home first!"
"The best place for you," said her sister, Sydney, calmly. "I see no use in taking a child like you to Mrs. Kirk's grand ball."
"A child, indeed," flashed the younger sister, with a pout of her rosebud lips. "I am as tall as you, Syd, and I was seventeen yesterday. It's real mean to call me a child and leave me at home every time I get invited out. I know why it is, though. It's because mamma spends every dollar papa gives her decking out you and Georgie, and there's never a decent thing left for me to wear."
"It is because you are too pretty, my dear," laughed her father, who had entered the dressing-room unnoticed. "The girls keep you back because they are afraid you will cut them out with their fine beaux."
Sydney and Georgina flushed angrily and muttered that it wasn't so, and that papa ought to be ashamed of himself—it was all his fault that Queenie was setting herself up for a woman so fast when he couldn't afford to dress the two that were already grown decently enough for the position they had to fill in society.
The poor, worried mother, having been so quickly snubbed on the subject of the old green silk, looked on and said nothing.