Page:Minnie Flynn (1925).pdf/38

 I had a mess o' hair like that. Mine's so straight I've give up tryin' to do a thing with it."

"Maybe if you washed it offener," Minnie suggested in an even tone, "and braided it around your head, you'd keep them stray hairs from lappin' over your ears. You know, Net, any girl can improve herself if she's a mind to."

"I s'pose so," and defiance crept again into Nettie's voice. "But what difference does it make how I look? I might be as ugly as Elsie Bicker for all the good times I get out o' life. Is it any wonder that I'm soured, Min?"

Minnie reached over for a bottle of home-made cologne—(lemon-verbena leaves soaked in alcohol)—and poured some of the liquid into the palm of her left hand. Then she dipped the fingers of her right hand into it and brushed it over her hair, behind her ears and across her mouth.

"Nettie," she said at last, "you'd have just as good times as me if you'd be willing to give somethin' toward it. You take life too serious, Net. Why, you and Elsie Bicker act as if you was a couple of tragedy queens. Laugh up! Don't be a couple o' glooms always goin' around feelin' sorry for yourselves. That's no way to make a bunch of friends, and hold 'em. Now I ask you, Nettie, who wants the measles to come to a party? And that's the way you act, you and Elsie Bicker."

"But I ain't got your talent for kiddin' and makin' other people laugh," whined Nettie. "You was just born with it, you know it. Ma marked you, Minnie, sure as there's a God, she did. She never went to no burlesque show before I was born."

"Maybe," answered Minnie, "but them are things we ain't sure of. Whether she marked me or not, Net, I learned this much when I was only a kid: that everything in life is