Tillie said she wanted Thea to have a ball dress “above all things.” She bought a fashion book especially devoted to evening clothes and looked hungrily over the colored plates, picking out costumes that would be becoming to “a blonde.” She wanted Thea to have all the gay clothes she herself had always longed for; clothes she often told herself she needed “to recite in.”
“Tillie,” Thea used to cry impatiently, “can’t you see that if Miss Spencer tried to make one of those things, she’d make me look like a circus girl? Anyhow, I don’t know anybody in Chicago. I won’t be going to parties.”
Tillie always replied with a knowing toss of her head, “You see! You’ll be in society before you know it. There ain’t many girls as accomplished as you.”
On the morning of the fifteenth of October the Kronborg family, all of them but Gus, who couldn’t leave the store, started for the station an hour before train time. Charley had taken Thea’s trunk and telescope to the depot in his delivery wagon early that morning. Thea wore her new blue serge traveling-dress, chosen for its serviceable qualities. She had done her hair up carefully, and had put a pale-blue ribbon around her throat, under a little lace collar that Mrs. Kohler had crocheted for her. As they went out of the gate, Mrs. Kronborg looked her over thoughtfully. Yes, that blue ribbon went very well with the dress, and with Thea’s eyes. Thea had a rather unusual touch about such things, she reflected comfortably. Tillie always said that Thea was “so indifferent to dress,” but her mother noticed that she usually put her clothes on well. She felt the more at ease about letting Thea go away from home, because she had good sense about her clothes and never tried to dress up too much. Her coloring was so individual, she was so unusually fair, that in the wrong clothes she might easily have been “conspicuous.”
It was a fine morning, and the family set out from the house in good spirits. Thea was quiet and calm. She had forgotten nothing, and she clung tightly to her handbag, which held her trunk-key and all of her money that was not in an envelope pinned to her chemise. Thea walked behind the others, holding Thor by the hand, and this time she did not feel that the procession was too long. Thor was uncommunicative that morning, and would only talk about how he would rather get a sand bur in his toe every day than wear shoes and stockings. As they passed the cottonwood grove where Thea often used to bring him in his cart, she asked him who would take him for nice long walks after sister went away.
“Oh, I can walk in our yard,” he replied unappreciatively. “I guess I can make a pond for my duck.”
Thea leaned down and looked into his face. “But you won’t forget about sister, will you?” Thor shook his head. “And won’t you be glad when sister comes back and can take you over to Mrs. Kohler’s to see the pigeons?”
“Yes, I’ll be glad. But I’m going to have a pigeon my own self.”
“But you haven’t got any little house for one. Maybe Axel would make you a little house.”
“Oh, her can live in the barn, her can,” Thor drawled indifferently.