Alas for human plans, she woke in the morning with a bad cold in her head—eyes sore and streaming, a painful cough, and a nose whose color rivaled that of Hannah’s cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. We tried every remedy we could (a plaster and a poultice, if you please, and sufficient Jesuits’ drops to convert a Hottentot to Rome), but nothing availed, and as the day wore to evening, poor Cinderella was forced to acknowledge that—failing a fairy godmother with powers to heal the sick on top of all others—she would not be able to attend the ball after all.

Well, as Mr. Longfellow reminds us, “Into each life some rain must fall,” and I was tucking the patient under her blankets and placing the invalid bell and a tall stack of handkerchiefs by her side preparatory to going downstairs for a quiet evening of apples and Quentin Durward, when she looked at me with those blue eyes streaming rivers of disappointment and rheum, and said, “I suppose you will wear your tarlatan, Jo.”

“Why, what on earth do you mean?” I replied, thinking her delirious, for I was most comfortably clad in my old gray housedress and had no more notion of changing into finer attire than of flying.

“To go to the dance,” she said. “Of course you shall go in my place.”

“Of course I shall do no such thing,” I retorted, for you know my love for both dances in general and the Tudors in particular.

“Oh, Jo, you must!” she cried, although in her poor croaky voice it sounded closer to Oh, Do, you bust. “We can’t leave poor Laurie to go all alone, hard as he has worked and horrid as Miss Randal has been to him.”

“Fiddlesticks,” I said. “He has all his college friends there to keep him company, and if you don’t go then Mr. Laurence needn’t chaperone, which I imagine will come as great relief to him, for he don’t care for the Tudors any more than I do.”

“It would look rude and queer to cry off now,” she said. “And besides, Mr. Laurence has given Bridget the night off, so has nothing for supper. Oh, Jo, please do this, and I’ll never ask you for anything, ever again.”

Well, you know what a wheedling little puss Amy can be when she sets her mind to it, so at the last, there I was, best-bib-and-tuckered in my tarlatan and carrying Meg’s stiffest embroidered handkerchief, uncomfortable as could be, entering the Tudors’ house on Laurie’s arm.

And, oh, Marmee, I wish you could have seen the dismay on the faces of Laurie’s friends when they discovered that the “Miss March” who was to accompany him for the evening was to be, not the youngest, but the second eldest! Little Mr. Parker looked set to cry, and nor could I fault him for the sentiment, for if I had been promised an evening of gazing upon the beauteous Amy and been served instead with cross old Jo, I should have felt exactly the same way.