“We have come to take you for a spin in our new automobile,” Polly cried, gayly. “Where is Simeon? You think he would not care to go? Well, leave him for once, and come as far as Wolfshead, and we will lunch there and bring you back before sunset.”
Deena’s delicate complexion was reddened by the heat of the preserve kettle, her sleeves were rolled above her elbows, and a checked apron with a bib acted as overalls. Polly twitched her to the stairs.
“What a fright you make of yourself,” she exclaimed; “and yet, I declare, you are pretty, in spite of it! Ben has to go down in the town to get some more gasoline, and then he means to persuade Stephen French to go with us, so rush upstairs and change your dress while I report to him that you will go, and he will come back for us in half an hour.”
Stephen French, who was to make the fourth in the automobile, was Harmouth’s young professor of zoölogy, a favorite alike with the students and the dons, with the social element in the town as well as the academic. To Ben Minthrop he had been a saving grace during a rather dissipated career at college, and now that that young gentleman was married, and his feet set in the path of commercial respectability, the friendship was even more cemented. On Ben’s part there was admiration and gratitude, on Stephen’s the genuine liking an older man has for a youngster who has had the pluck to pull himself together. It was a bond between the Shelton sisters that their husbands shared one sentiment in common—namely, a romantic affection for Stephen French.
Deena was standing in her petticoat when her sister joined her in her bed-room—not in a petticoat of lace and needlework, such as peeped from under the edge of Polly’s smart frock as she threw herself into a chair, but a skimpy black silk skirt with a prim ruffle, made from an old gown of Mrs. Ponsonby’s. It was neat and fresh, however, and her neck and arms, exposed by her little tucked underwaist, were of a beauty to ravish a painter or a sculptor. Polly herself, boyish and angular in build, groaned to think of such perfection “born to blush unseen”; her one season in Boston had demonstrated to her the value of beauty as an asset in that strange, modern exchange we call society. She was evidently trying to say something that would not get itself said, and her elder sister was too busy with her toilet to notice the signs of perturbation. Finally the words came with a rush.
“Deena,” she said, “when we were children in the nursery you once said I was a ‘coward at you’—I remember your very words. Well, I believe I am still! You are so dignified and repressing that I am always considering what you will think a liberty. I have taken a liberty now, but please don’t be angry. It does seem so absurd to be afraid to make a present to one’s own sister.”
She opened the bedroom door, and dragged in a huge box, which she proceeded to uncord, talking all the while.
“I have brought you a dress,” she said; “a coat and skirt made for me by R——, but Ben cannot bear me in it because it’s so womanish—pockets where no man would have them, and the sleeves all trimmed—and so, as I think it charming myself, I hoped, perhaps, you would accept it.”
Both sisters blushed, Polly with shyness, Deena with genuine delight. She loved pretty things, although she rarely yielded to their temptations, and she kissed her sister in loving acknowledgment of the gift. It never occurred to her that Simeon could object.
Polly, in high spirits at her success, next declared that she must arrange Deena’s hair, and she pushed her into a low chair in front of the dressing table, and fluffed the golden mane high above the temples, and coiled and pinned it into waves and curls that caught the sunlight on their silken sheen and gave it back. A very beautiful young woman was reflected in old Mother Ponsonby’s small looking-glass, a face of character and spirit, in spite of its regularity.