"Your hair is too lumpy-looking under your cap and it rides up too high on your head."
"Well, it shall have to be cut off then. It will grow out again."
"Dee! No! You mustn't! That would make your father really angry. Plait it in a tight rope and put it down your neck, inside your collar."
No sooner said than done, and now the cap came down to meet the upturned collar.
"You must wear Zebedee's gloves and take off your ring. Your hands look mighty sissy. You'll do fine if Henry Ford will just behave and you don't have to get out to crank him. It's too bad about the pants. You would be perfect if you could just wear pants. If you should have to get out, it would sho' be a joke if you got arrested for wearing skirts. You look terribly like a bad boy," and so she did. "And now I must get back to the task of finding a job for myself," and Dum returned wearily to the want column. Dee's delightful get-rich-quick scheme made everything else seem very colorless.
"'Wanted—A mother's helper to mind four children and wash dishes.' What do you reckon the lazy thing would be doing while I was doing all that for her? 'Wanted—Woman to wash only by the day.' Does the idiot think I could keep it up all night? Here we are! 'Wanted—Twenty able-bodied young women to apply between the hours of three and five p. m. to make house-to-house canvass, selling a number of household novelties.'" Dum grabbed her hat and began to draw on her gloves. "Here, Page, cut this out for me. It is ten minutes to three now and I can just get there!"
Dum was out of the house before we could say Jack Robinson, the clipping from the want column grasped tightly in her hand and her chin set in its determined, square, do-or-die lines.
"When Dum looks like that she always gets what she goes after," said Dee, looking admiringly after her twin as she jumped in Henry Ford, who spent a large part of his waking life parked in front of the apartment house or newspaper office. "Maybe going in a car, even a bum one like Henry, will queer her game. If she will only have sense enough to stop a little to one side of the place!"
We waited in almost breathless silence for Dum's return, Dee experimenting with her hair for the morrow's fray and I gazing out of the window at the whirling jitneys skidding around the corner, making hair-breadth escapes.
"There she is!" and Henry Ford sure enough threaded his way jauntily through the crowded street, turned himself about like a graceful skater and parked himself in good order just one inch from the curb. The Tuckers were all born chauffeurs, and, like most born chauffeurs or riders or drivers, they showed their skill by going faster than the law allows. They prided themselves on being able to go very close to things without touching them, and indeed I have seen Henry Ford almost take the buttons off the fat traffic cop at Seventh and Broad. That time Zebedee was driving, and as he skimmed by the grinning policeman he called out: