“Just the rising gong, dear. I intended to have wakened you before it sounded. You’ll have just time to dress before breakfast. What are you going to put on?”
“I got this dress I wore here, for best, and I got a black and white check gingham for every day. I had two blue calicoes and a red merino, but Mrs. Webb said I wasn’t to bring ’em, ’cause they was colored, and I’m wearin’ black things.” Betsy told off the items of her wardrobe in one breath.
“Put on your gingham. It will do for now. Have you some light shoes?”
“Only just these copper-toes. I stub ’em out awful, and Pa didn’t b’lieve in no foolishness, he said. Summertimes I go barefoot, anyway.”
“Dear me! Well, these will do until after breakfast.”
Betsy dressed hurriedly, after having first been introduced to a big porcelain bathtub, where she was told to hop in this morning and every morning thereafter, for a splash.
“Oh my! Can I learn to swim in it?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t wide enough for you.”
“It’s bigger’n where I tried to learn in the brook. There wasn’t room in that pool for the whole of me. I just kicked my legs and held on to the bank, and then I kicked my arms, with my legs on the bank. But I dunno if I really learned.”
Aunt Kate laughed a merry laugh, and left her. Betsy finished off her toilette by tying a rusty black ribbon on the end of her tight pigtail, and was ready for breakfast.