Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/91

Rh and men as even as possible, and we've lots more men now. I'm going to put your name down myself."

And she did. Reba found it there that same evening. She didn't cross it out, and when she went to bed that night she lay awake a long while in the dark, from sheer anxiety.

"I'm going to dance with a young man!" she whispered. "Just think, Rebecca Jerome,—just think!"

And "just thinking" she had almost forgotten to say her prayers.

As she stood before her mirror on the momentous evening, and gazed at herself in her shortened white muslin, she wasn't very well satisfied.

"I'm afraid I look just what I am," she sighed—"an old maid! I know I do! I wish I knew how to do my hair." (It was crimped, and pompadoured over an artificial foundation, and in the back it was rolled into a tiny tight wad, held firmly by long wire hairpins.) "I wish—I wish," she went on, "that I had short sleeves!" Aunt Augusta had always maintained that bare forearms suggested dish-washing to her. "And I feel sure that these ruffles over the shoulders are out of date. Oh, I wish" A wave of self-consciousness swept over her. She had just been hooking Mamie into a nile-green chiffon, low-necked—very low-necked—she had had to pin it up behind to the firm foundation of Mamie's corsets. Reba's white muslin fastened up to the tight roll of hair at the back of her neck. "I don't believe I'll go down. Nobody'll miss me. I may be dressed differently from anybody else there." She stood uncertainly by the door with her hand upon the knob. Then, "Coward,"