t from the rooms
to herself. For now upon her own person she wrought improvements. These
did not escape Johnnie, who accepted them as a part of the general
upheaval--an upheaval which she informed him was "Spring cleaning." Each
night before retiring she pressed her one dress, and freshened its
washable collar; she also brushed her hair a full hundred times,
conscientiously counting the strokes. As for her teeth, Johnnie warned
her that she would wear out both them and the ivory-handled brush in no
time, since, night and morning, she used the brush tirelessly. Also she
wasted valuable hours (in his opinion) by manicuring her fingernails
when she might better have been threading a kitchen jungle all
beast-infested.

Next, another, and the most startling change in her. She came out of her
blue room one morning looking very tall, and odd. At first Johnnie did
not see what was wrong, and stared, puzzled and bewildered.

But Barber saw. "What's the idea?" he wanted to know, and none too
pleasantly.

"I'm almost seventeen," Cis answered.

Almost seventeen! Johnnie looked at her closer, and discovered the thing
that made her different. It was her hair. Usually she wore it braided,
and tied at the nape of her neck. But now that shining braid was pinned
in a coil on the back of her head!

"Y' look foolish!" went on Barber. "And y' can't waste any more money
'round here, buyin' pins and combs and such stuff. Y' can jus' wear it
down your back for another year or so."

"All the other girls have their hair up," she argued. "And I've got to
have mine out of the way."

She did not take that coil down. Yet she was by no means indifferent to
the attitude of Big Tom. Johnnie, who understood so well her every
expression, noticed how, when the longshoreman sometimes entered
unexpectedly, Cis would go whiter than usual, as if frightened; she
would start at the mere sound of his voice, and drop whatever happened
to be in her hand.

When Big Tom was out she would walk about aimlessly and restlessly;
would halt absentmindedly with her face to a wall and not seem to see
it. She did not want to talk; she preferred to be let completely alone.
She was irritable, or she sighed a good deal. She took to watching the
clock, and wishing it were to-morrow morning. And if, giving in to
Johnnie's entreaties, she consented to take part in a think, all she
cared to do was bury the unhappy Cora, or watch lovely, and
love-smitten, Elaine breathe h