What she really wanted was to get a bath and to be alone for a few hours. Her kind hosts thought it would be wise to let her do whatever she wanted, so they gave her God-speed but begged her not to be out late.
Judy now longed for solitude with the same eagerness she had before longed for companionship. She knew it would be unwise for her to give up to this desire to any extent and determined to get back to her kind friends before dark, but be alone she must for a while. She got the key from the concierge and entered the studio. All was as she had left it. Windows and doors opened wide soon dispelled the close odor. A cold bath in the very attractive white porcelain tub, the pride of the Bents, made poor Judy feel better in spite of herself.
“I don’t want to feel better. I’ve been brave and noble all morning and now I want to be weak and miserable. I don’t care whether school keeps or not. I am a poor, forlorn, broken-hearted girl, without any friends in all the world except some Normandy peasants. The Browns will all hate me, and my mother and father I may never see again. Oh, Kent! Kent! Why didn’t you just pick me up and make me go with you? If you had been very, very firm, I’d have gone.”
Judy remembered with a grim smile how in old days at college she had longed to wear mourning and how absurd she had made herself by dyeing her hair and draping herself in black. “I’m going into mourning now. It is about all I can do for Kent. It won’t cost much and somehow I’d feel better.” Judy, ever visualizing, pictured herself in black with organdy collar and cuffs and a mournful, patient look. “I’ll just go on selling tarts. It will help the Tricots and give me my board.” She counted out her money, dwindled somewhat, but now that she was working she felt she might indulge her grief to the extent of a black waist and some white collars and cuffs. “I’ve got a black skirt and I’ll get my blue suit dyed to-morrow. I’ll line my black sport hat with white crêpe. That will make it do.” In pity for herself, she wept again.
She slipped out of the studio and made her few purchases at a little shop around the corner. Madame, the proprietaire, was all sympathy. She had laid in an especial stock of cheap mourning, she told Judy, as there was much demand for it now.
It took nimble fingers to turn the jaunty sport hat into a sad little mourning bonnet, but Judy was ever clever at hat making, and when she finished just before the sun set, she viewed her handiwork with pardonable pride. She slipped into her cheap black silk waist and pinned on the collar and cuffs. The hat was very becoming, so much so that Judy had another burst of tears.
“I can’t bear for it to be becoming. I want to look as ugly and forlorn as possible.”
She determined to leave her serge suit in the studio and come on the following day to take it to a dye shop. As she was to do this, she decided not to leave the key with the concierge but take it with her.
Her kind friends looked sadly at the mourning. They realized when they saw it that Judy had given up all hope of her friend.
“Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it!” exclaimed the old grenadier.