“I’ll have peep-holes for eyes, and the slit will outline my mouth. Between the dances I’ll kneel down in a corner so that the box touches the ground, and I’ll look so real, that I shall expect every one to drop in letters—chocolate letters, observe! You might buy some and set the example!”
For the next twenty-four hours an unusual air of excitement and bustle pervaded the college, and the conversation at mealtime consisted for the most part of fragmentary questions and answers bearing on the important subject of costumes in making.
“Lend me your boot brushes, like a lamb!”
“Got an old pair of brown stockings you can’t wear again?”
“Be an angel and lend me your striped curtains just for the night!”
“Spare just ten minutes to sew up my back?”
So on it went, and in truth it was a pleasant chance to hear the merry, inconsequent chatter; for, like every other class of the community, girl students have their besetting sins, and one of the most obvious of these is an air of assurance, of dogmatism, of final knowledge of life, against which there can be no appeal. Girls of nineteen and twenty will settle a dispute of ages with a casual word; students of economy will advance original schemes warranted to wipe the offence of poverty from the globe; science students with unlowered voices will indulge across the dinner-table in scathing criticisms on historic creeds which their fathers hold in reverence; and on each young face, on each young tongue, can be read the same story of certainty and self-esteem.
This state of mind is either sad, amusing, or exasperating, according to the mood of the hearer; but, whatever be his mood, he yet knows in his heart that it is a transitory phase, and an almost inevitable result of theoretical knowledge. A few years of personal grip with life and its problems will make short work of that over-confidence, and replace it with a gentler, sweeter touch.
But to-night was a night of frolic, and one would have to travel far indeed to find a more amusing spectacle than an impromptu costume dance in Clough Hall. Beauty is a secondary consideration, and the girl who has achieved the oddest and most ludicrous appearance is the heroine of the hour. Darsie Garnett made a fascinating Alice in Wonderland in her short blue frock, white pinny, and little ankle-strap slippers, her hair fastened back by an old-fashioned round comb, and eyebrows painted into an inquiring arch, but she received no attention in comparison with that lavished upon Hannah, when she dashed nimbly in at the door, and, kneeling down in a corner of the room, presented a really lifelike appearance of a pillar-box, a white label bearing the hours of “Chocolate deliveries” pasted conspicuously beneath the slit. Hannah’s prophecies proved correct, for it became one of the amusements of the evening to feed that yawning cavity with chocolates and other dainties, so that more than one sweet tooth in the assembly made a note of the suggestion for a future day.
The Dutch Doll was another huge success; for so dolly and so beyond all things Dutch did she appear, standing within the doorway with jointed arms and rigid back, with dark hair plastered over the forehead in the well-known curve, and the three little spots of colour blazing out from the whitened background, that it was almost impossible to believe that she was living flesh and blood. Like a statue she stood until the laughter and applause had lasted for several minutes, and then, stepping jerkily on one side, made way for a new and even more startling apparition.