The upshot of these whispered comparisons was, of course, a desire to exchange clothes and to pose before the mirror in the borrowed delights of exotic garb. Nancy accepted the plan joyfully and watched each stage of her masquerade, while Elizabeth and Helen nimbly tied her in till she was a replica of themselves. She gazed at herself in surprise when the process was done, when her hair had been unbound and loosely gathered into the circle of a satin bow, for she had stepped completely over from the East to the West and thrown away every vestige of her Chinese upbringing. She had the indefinable marks of beauty, her way of holding her head and shoulders, the slim easiness of limbs and body, the youthful melancholy expressed by the dark color of her eyes, marks which promised great loveliness for the future. Helen and Elizabeth candidly recognized the authority with which the filmy frock and long white stockings became the black-haired girl on whom they had been put.
"You are a beauty, Nancy!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "The dress seems to belong to you more than it does to me."
She suggested quite truly the difference between her own prettiness of feature, her own healthy robustness of figure, attractive because they were the qualities so well suited to a romp of sixteen summers, yet qualities on which the frock had been imposed with the obviously self-conscious elegance of a party dress, and the charming seriousness of Nancy's manner, to which all garments, mean and splendid alike, paid their toll.
There was a symbolism in Nancy's appearance, a secret betrayed by her sad smile, and spectators more imaginative than Helen or Elizabeth might have pictured the spirit of her mother close at hand, longing with sombre eyes to see her daughter restored to the country she had lost.
CHAPTER X
Edward and David were having their own good time together. They were not troubling much about distinctions in clothes, once Edward had solved the mystery of how to wear pyjamas, but they were trying to compress every incident of the twelve and thirteen years of their lives into the few hours given them to talk. David, like his older sisters, had come to China too late to pick up Chinese from a nurse and had been sent to a school where conversation in Chinese was discouraged, for fear of the undesirable things the pupils might learn, so China, except in a superficial way, was undiscovered territory. He could not keep out of his speech the arrogance which foreign children assumed toward native life.
"Do you mean to say you live all the time with nothing but Chinese?" he asked. "Don't you ever have anybody to play with?"
"Why, of course, I have lots of people to play with; our family is bigger than yours."
"But only Chinese. That can't be much fun. What do you do? How do you pass the time?"