Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/281



ANT me to hook you, or anything?" five minutes later the voice of Aunt Emma asked from outside the bathroom door, where Reba stood looking down at the first dress her hands had fallen upon in the closet—a sprigged muslin, white and crisp from recent laundering. How well she remembered it! How calm and steady her heart-beats had been when she used to wear this dress, on warm Sunday afternoons four or five summers ago! How clean, how chaste she had been then!

"Yes, please," she replied; and slipping the dress over her head, and her arms into the long tight sleeves, she called, "Come in."

She stood passive and silent, while the older woman pulled and tugged at her back.

"My goodness!" Aunt Emma exclaimed at last. "There ain't a bit of use trying to get this together back here. You don't seem to belong to this dress any more, Reba. I had no idea you'd broadened out so."

Reba glanced at her reflection in the oval-tipped, black-walnut mirror over the marble washstand.

"You're right, I guess. I don't belong to this dress any more. Let me get back into the dirty one where I do belong," she said dispassionately.

Everything Reba said that evening was spoken in the same unemotional voice. "Just as if she'd turned