“Every bit of it?”
“Yes. I had $500. It lasted me seven years—from the time I was ten to now.”
“Are you seventeen? You don’t look it.”
“I know I don’t. My teachers tell me that my mind is very quick but my body is slow. It annoys me to be mistaken for a child of fifteen. And I have to dress that way, too, because my dresses still fit me and clothes are very expensive.”
“Are they?”
Dulcie became confidential and loquacious:
“Oh, very. You don’t know about girls’ clothes, I suppose. But they cost a very great deal. So I’ve had to wear out dresses I’ve had ever since I was fourteen and fifteen. And so I can’t put up my hair because it would make my dresses look ridiculous; and that renders the situation all the worse—to be obliged to go about with bobbed hair, you see? There doesn’t seem to be any way out of it,” she ended, with a despairing little laugh, “and I was seventeen last February!”
“Cheer up! You’ll grow old fast enough. And now you’re going to have a jolly little salary as my model, and you ought to be able to buy suitable clothes. Oughtn’t you?”
She did not answer, and he repeated the question. And drew from her, reluctantly, that her father, so far, had absorbed what money she had earned by posing.