Nor could any tale of my needs, any indignation concerning the high-handed retention of my property, move her from that statement. I went to my room and wept with rage. Bob impressed me nowadays as a stylish youth. How would he like taking me to a musicale in a short black skirt, a reefer and that dumpy turban?
Upon my fit of pettishness in came Miss Putnam. She was politely absorbed in her own chiffonier for a while. Then she turned to me with a comical air of balancing the fear of intrusiveness against a friendly desire to help.
“Is it—can I do anything for you?” she asked finally.
“You can tell that wretched martinet downstairs what I think of her, if you have sufficient command of language,” I rejoined, wiping my eyes furiously. Then I told her my tale of woe. She laughed. Then she hesitated and blushed.
“I’m just home from Paris, as I told you,” she said. “I’m not going out tonight. And I knew the Margaret Louisa well enough to unpack for an emergency. We’re about of a height—would you think me desperately impertinent if—if——”
And she actually offered to lend me some clothes. And I—I, Ellen Berwick, of Agonquitt, where all borrowing is regarded as criminally unthrifty, and where the borrowing of finery would seem degenerately frivolous as well—I went to that musicale at the Waldorf in an absolute confection of heavy black lace over white silk, and a hat all white tulle and roses and jet! Robert whistled rudely as he saw me.
“Is this the way they do things in Agonquitt now?” he asked.
And from something I overheard him saying to a lovely young matron-patroness in a peach-colored crêpe, I gathered that he had somewhat apologetically prepared her to be kind to a nice little rustic from his old home. Thus clothes, as adornments and not merely coverings, made their first distinct appeal to me; it was the voice of New York, if I had only known it.
I blessed Theresa Putnam that evening, but how much more did I bless her when toward the end of the fortnight she burst into our joint abode with something less than her usual calm of manner, and cried:
“Clorinda Dorset isn’t coming back to the Medical School this year. Do you want to meet Dr. Lyons? For if you do, and you like her and she likes you——”