Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/84

74 here she was getting ready for a dancing-party—a dancing-party with young men! Reba had never danced with a young man! Her stitches were disgraceful! They would have distressed Aunt Augusta. They troubled even Reba; but it was after five, and the party began at half-past seven.

The little room Reba was sitting in, although in shape and size and furnishings the exact replica of a dozen or so other little rooms, in the long row of which it was one, had absorbed, during the seven weeks that Reba had been its occupant, much of the atmosphere of her room at home. There was the same neatness, the same perfection about the erect pillow and wrinkleless bedspread. On top of the little humpbacked trunk back of the door appeared the fringed afghan which Reba's mother had crocheted twenty years ago, folded squarely. One of Reba's round, hand-crocheted washcloths was hanging to dry, in correct and sanitary position, on a small hook on the side of the commode, and, just as she had always been taught to arrange clean towels, like crossed hands on top of the water-pitcher at home, so they were placed here. The top of the oak chiffonier had a chaste look, like an altar—no array of bottles, cosmetics, cold-cream jars, powder-cans, or powder-puffs. A large, tightly-stuffed, red-satin pin-cushion, square with a white "tidy" on it, was in the center, and on either side an empty, white-frosted cologne bottle, decorated with red stripes. And back of the cushion appeared a picture of Christ, framed in brown plush with a moss rose painted in oils on the plush. On the little wabbly oblong table beside the chiffonier,