thought about myself in that way before,"
admitted Mollie, naively.

"Why," returned Dolly, quite sincerely, "you must have looked in the
glass."

"Ye-es," with a slow shake of the head; "but it did n't look the same
way in the glass,--it did n't look as nice."

Dolly regarded her with a surprise which was not unmingled with
affectionate pity. She was not as unsophisticated as Mollie, and never
had been. As the feminine head of the family, she had acquired a certain
shrewdness early in life, and had taken a place in the household the
rest were hardly equal to. There had been no such awakening as this for
her. At fourteen, she had been fully and complacently conscious of the
exact status of her charms and abilities, physical and mental. She had
neither under-nor over-rated them. She had smiled back at her reflection
in her mirror, showing two rows of little milk-white teeth, and being
well enough satisfied with being a charming young person with a secure
complexion and enviable self-poise. She understood herself, and
attained perfection in the art of understanding others. Her rather
sharp experience had not allowed _her_ to look in the glass in guileless
ignorance of what she saw there, and perhaps this made her all the
fonder of Mollie.

"What kind of a dress are you going to choose if Phil buys you one?" she
asked.

"Maroon," answered Mollie. "Oh!" with a little shuddering breath of
desperate delight, "how I wish I could have a maroon silk!"

Dolly shook her head doubtfully.

"It wouldn't be serviceable, because you could only have the one, and
you could n't wear it on wet days," she said.

"I should n't care about its being serviceable," burst forth innocent
Vagabondia, rebelling against the trammels of prudence. "I want
something pretty. I do so detest serviceable things. I would stay in the
house all the wet days if I might have a maroon silk to wear when it was
fine."

"She is beginning to long for purple and fine linen," sighed Dolly, as
she ran up to her bedroom afterward. "The saints forefend! It is a bad
sign. She will fall in love the next thing. Poor, indiscreet little
damsel!"

But, despite her sage lamentations, there was even at that moment a plan
maturing in her mind which was an inconsistent mixture of Vagabondia's
goodnature and whim. Mollie's fancy for the maroon silk had struck her
as being artistic, and there was not a Crewe among them who had not
a weakness for the artistic in effect.