She got up and leaned and kissed me, light. Wasn't that a funny thing to do? But I loved her for it.
"Anything I own," she says, "is yours to use just the way you want to use it."
"You're just as sweet as you are pretty," I told her, "and more I dunno who could say about no one."
I lay awake most all night planning it, like you will. I spent most of the next day tracking round seeing folks about it. And everybody pitched in to work, both on account of needing the money for the little park us ladies had set our hearts on, and on account of being glad to have some place, at last, to show what clothes we'd got to some one, even if it was nobody but each other.
"Oh," says Mis' Holcomb, "I was thinking only the other day if only somebody'd get married. You know we ain't had an evening party in this town in years—not since the Hewitts went away. But I couldn't think of a soul likely to have a big evening wedding for their daughter but the Mortons, and little Abbie Morton, she's only 'leven. It'd take another good six years before we could get asked to that. And I did want to get a real chance to wear my dress before I made it over."
"The Prices might have a wedding for Mamie," says Mis' Toplady, reflective. "Like enough with a catyier and all that. But I dunno's Mamie's ever had a beau in her life."
We were to have the exhibit—the Art and Loan Dress Exhibit, we called it—at my house, and I tell you it was fun getting ready for it. But it was hard work, too, as most fun is.
The morning of the day that was the day, everybody came bringing their stuff over in their arms. We had dress-forms from all the dress-makers and all the stores in town, and they were all set up around the rim of my parlor. Mis' Sturgis had just got her black silk put up and was trying to make out whether side view to show the three quarters train or front view to show the jet ornament was most becoming to the dress, when Miss Mayhew brought in her things and began helping us.
"How the dead speaks in clothes," Mis' Sturgis says. "This jet ornament was on my mother's bonnet for twelve years when I was a little girl."
"The Irish crochet medallion in the front of my basque," says Mis' Merriman, "was on a scarf of my mother's that come from the old country. It got old, and I took the best of it and appliqued it on a crazy quilt and slept under it for years. Then when I see Irish crochet beginning to be wore in the magazines again, I ripped it off and ragged out in it."