Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou stood at the gate of the school. They had spent the morning in rehearsing. At noon they had been sent home with instructions to return at half-past two. The exhibition would begin at three.
"Of course," Miss Carrie had said, "you will not fail to be on time." And Miss Carrie had used her deepest tones.
It was not two o'clock, and the three stood at the gate, the first to return. They were in the same piece. It was "The Play." In a play one did more than suit the part.
In the play Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou found themselves the orphaned children of a soldier who had failed to return from the war. It was a very sad piece. Sadie had to weep, and more than once Emmy Lou had found tears in her eyes, watching her.
Miss Carrie said Sadie showed histrionic talent. Emmy Lou asked Hattie about it, who said it meant tears, and Emmy Lou remembered then how tears came naturally to Sadie.
When Aunt Cordelia heard they must dress to suit the part she came to see Miss Carrie, and so did the mamma of Sadie and the mamma of Hattie.
"Dress them in a kind of mild mourning," Miss Carrie explained, "not too deep, or it will seem too real, and, as three little sisters, suppose we dress them alike."
And now Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou stood at the gate ready for the play. Stiffly immaculate white dresses with beltings of black sashes, flared jauntily out above spotless white stockings and sober little slippers, while black-bound Leghorn hats shaded three anxious little countenances. By the exact center, each held a little handkerchief, black-bordered.
Hattie and Sadie and Emmy Lou wore each an anxious seriousness of countenance, but it was a variant seriousness; for as the hour approached, the solemn importance of the occasion was stealing brain-ward, and Emmy Lou even began to feel glad she was a part of The Exhibition, for to have been left out would have been worse even than the moment of mounting the platform.