Dresses hung straighter; belts served a better purpose; stockings were smoother; underwear was daintier. Then her hair‚ÅÝ‚Äîthat great dark mass of immovable infinitely curled hair‚ÅÝ‚Äîbegan to be subdued and twisted and combed until, with steady pains and study, it lay in thick twisted braids about her velvet forehead, like some shadowed halo. All this came much more slowly and spasmodically than one tells it. Few noticed the change much; none noticed all; and yet there came a night‚ÅÝ‚Äîa student‚Äôs social‚ÅÝ‚Äîwhen with a certain suddenness the whole school, teachers and pupils, realized the newness of the girl, and even Bles was startled.
He had bought her in town, at Christmas time, a pair of white satin slippers, partly to test the smallness of her feet on which in younger days he had rallied her, and partly because she had mentioned a possible white dress.
They were a cheap, plain pair but dainty, and they fitted well.
When the evening came and the students were marching and the teachers, save Miss Smith, were sitting rather primly apart and commenting, she entered the room. She was a little late, and a hush greeted her. One boy, with the inimitable drawl of the race, pushed back his ice-cream and addressed it with a mournful head-shake:
“Go ’way, honey, yo’ los’ yo’ tas’e!”
The dress was plain and fitted every curving of a healthy girlish form.
She paused a moment white-bodied and white-limbed but dark and velvet-armed, her full neck and oval head rising rich and almost black above, with its deep-lighted eyes and crown of silent darkling hair.
To some, such a revelation of grace and womanliness in this hoyden, the gentle swelling of lankness to beauty, of lowliness to shy self-poise, was a sudden joy, to others a mere blindness.