Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/161

Rh and hard to please. I want something dazzling and unaccountable to happen to me—something new and unlived and indescribable!”

She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and ﬂinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished ﬂoor.

“Well, then,” murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, “I can’t see why in the world you won’t go to the Gaines’s garden-party!” And caught in the whirlwind of her friend’s incomprehensible mirth, she still persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: “If you’ll only let me lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you’ll look smarter than anybody there…"

Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way to fulﬁll Mrs. Dressel’s prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could no more help reﬂecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the subtler inﬂuence of word and look; and her face and ﬁgure were so new to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced the effect of a young girl in her ﬁrst “good” frock. In Mrs. Dressel’s festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its petals.

Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of conﬁdential intimacy with the mother she had lost, had [ 145 ]