out to happen.
The courtly bows of the old Colonel, standing between the great white
pillars, Mrs. Sherman's warm welcome, and Mom Beck's old-time curtseys,
seemed to usher them into a fascinating story-book sort of life, far
more interesting than any Mary had yet read.

Several hours later, sitting in the long drawing-room, she wondered if
she could be the same girl who one short week before was chasing across
the desert like a Comanche Indian, beating the bushes for rattlesnakes,
or washing dishes in the hot little kitchen of the Wigwam. Here in the
soft light shed from many waxen tapers in the silver candelabra,
surrounded by fine old ancestral portraits, and furniture that shone
with the polish of hospitable generations, Mary felt civilized down to
her very finger-tips: so thoroughly a lady, through and through, that
the sensation sent a warm thrill over her.

That feeling had begun soon after her arrival, when Mom Beck ushered her
into a luxurious bathroom. Mary enjoyed luxury like a cat. As she
splashed away in the big porcelain tub, she wished that Hazel Lee could
see the tiled walls, the fine ample towels with their embroidered
monograms, the dainty soaps, and the cut-glass bottles of toilet-water,
with their faint odor as of distant violets. Then she wondered if Mom
Beck would think that she had refused her offers of assistance because
she was not used to the services of a lady's maid. She was half-afraid
of this old family servant in her imposing head-handkerchief and white
apron.

Recalling Joyce's experiences in France and what had been the duties of
her maid, Marie, she decided to call her in presently to brush her hair
and tie her slippers. Afterward she was glad that she had done so, for
Mom Beck was a practised hair-dresser, and made the most of Mary's thin
locks. She so brushed and fluffed and be-ribboned them in a new way,
with a big black bow on top, that Mary beamed with satisfaction when she
looked in the glass. The new way was immensely becoming.

Then when she went down to dinner, it seemed so elegant to find Mr.
Sherman in a dress suit. The shaded candles and cut glass and silver and
roses on the table made it seem quite like the dinner-parties she had
read about in novels, and the talk that circled around of the latest
books and the new opera, and the happenings in the world at large, and
the familiar mention of famous names, made her feel as if she were in
the real social whirl at last.