Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/73

 much today that they're all swelled up. I can hardly get these slippers on."

Queenie burst into hymn:

Delight alone was silent. The window-pane against the night gave her back a dark but clear reflection of herself. Standing there no one could accuse her of monopolizing a looking-glass. She was already dressed, having curling hair that needed no coaxing, and taking little care with the details of her costume. Now she gazed in a rapt, impersonal delight at the sombre beauty of the reflection. She was wearing a dress that had been her mother's, a deep, old-gold satin, with black lace about the low-cut neck and short sleeves. The satin was cotton-backed, the lace cheap, but the effect with the girl's bewitching dark eyes and golden hair was barbarously beautiful. Annie and Pearl were sorry for her in that old-fashioned dress. They felt superior in their white dresses with the pink and blue scarves they had bought from the gypsy about their shoulders. Yet those earrings—where had she got those earrings? She was a deep one, not a bit like May who hid nothing. Still, they liked Delight. Her admiration of their dresses and beads and scarves was so childlike and open that they couldn't help liking her.

"I declare it makes me wish I was a girl again," said Mrs. Bye when they were ready. "Many's the gay dance I've been to, and not with Charley neither!"

On a sudden impulse they all kissed her good-bye as though they were going away for a long time, pressing their fresh lips to her thin cheek in turn. The unusual ceremony touched some deep well-spring of pity in