She would not be ready to apply her skill to Laurel until she was complete herself, except for just the finishing touch of her dress. When she would be ready for Laurel, the flabby fleshiness under the nightgown would have become all beautiful firm curves inside the flower-brocaded pink corsets; and the shapeless mop of tow would have become all beautiful firm curves too, like the hair on the wax busts in the show-windows of fashionable hair-dressing shops. Her eyes would have become ever so blue, and ever so large beneath transforming eyebrows that arched. The centers of her cheeks would be pink, and her lips red, and her neck and shoulders, bare of course without her dress, would be milky white, with lovely little lavender veins showing faintly here and there, like the guiding lines Laurel used sometimes when she wrote a letter, showing faintly through thick white note-paper.

When Laurel moved over before the mirror and stood in front of her mother for her hair to be done, and caught the reflection of her own freckled face and sunburned neck and arms, bony and hard, and her dark hair with the forbidding bang, it seemed to her that the pink and whiteness above her was like an angel’s in comparison.

“When shall you begin to put rouge and powder on me, Mother?” one day Laurel had asked.

“Not until nice girls your age begin to put it on,” her mother replied briefly, with the practicalness that guided all her decisions in regard to Laurel as to what was proper or improper, appropriate or inappropriate.

It was because Mrs. Dallas adhered to models so scrupulously that Laurel’s clothes were never cheap or flashy in appearance. Mrs. Dallas was like certain dressmakers, who know how to impart elegance and refinement to the clothes they make for others, while their own costumes are often extreme and unpleasantly conspicuous. Mrs. Dallas wore a good deal of imitation jewelry herself—large imitation pearls around her neck, large imitation pearls in her ears. But Laurel never wore jewelry at all, except a string of tiny gold beads.

The little Holland girl never wore jewelry at all, except a string of tiny gold beads. The little Holland girl was one of Mrs. Dallas’s models. In Milhampton the Henry Hollands were one of “the four hundred”—one of the first ten of “the four hundred,” in Mrs. Dallas’s opinion. Laurel did not attend the same dancing-class which Stephanie Holland attended, but Mrs. Dallas often attended it, looking down from her balcony seat (to occupy which no ticket of admission was required) onto the polished floor below, studying, scrutinizing, and recording as thorough and business-like a way as a dressmaker at a fashion-show in New York.

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