"My hair?..." said Miss Ellis, limply.
"You have such nice hair, but I do wish you'd do it differently," said Jane with anxious friendliness. "You have a mile of it, haven't you?"
The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly relaxed. "I used to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it—"I never spend any time fussing with it."
"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I adore doing hair. Please sit down—I just want to try something with it—something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into a stiff chair.
"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly neat top drawer.
"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,—see, like this? No, it wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your prayers,—and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of your face? Wait,—where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word! Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"
"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.
"And—do you mind my saying these things?—I've always bullied my friends about their clothes and colors—I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and navy blue."
"I always supposed white was right for every one."
"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt orange—Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."