Winnie Childs | Page 3

goes down," Miss Child apologized. "I wasn't laughing at any of you exactly, it was more the whole situation: us, dressed like stars of the Russian ballet and sick as dogs, pearls in our hair and basins in our hands, looking like queens and feeling like dolls with our stuffing gone."
"Don't speak of stuffing. It makes me think of sage and onions," quavered the tallest queen.
"Ugh!" they all groaned, except Winifred Child, who was to blame for starting the subject. "Ugh! Oh! Ugh!"
When they were better they lay back on their sofas, or leaned back in their chairs, their beautiful--or meant to be beautiful--faces pale, their eyes shut. And it was at this moment that Peter Rolls burst open the door.
As he had observed, the waxlike figures moved, sat upright, and stared. This sudden disturbance of brain balance made them all giddy, but the surprise of seeing a man, not a steward, at the door, was so great that for a moment or two it acted as a tonic. Nothing dreadful happened to any one of the five until after the smooth black head had been withdrawn and the door closed.
"A man!" breathed Miss Devereux, the abnormally tall girl in yellow chiffon over gold gauze.
"Yes, dear. I wonder what he wanted?" sighed Miss Carroll, the girl in rose.
The one in green was Miss Tyndale, the one in black and blue Miss Vedrine, all very becoming labels; and if they had Christian names of equal distinction to match, the alien known at home simply as "Win" had never heard them. They called each other Miss Devereux, Miss Carroll, Miss Tyndale, and Miss Vedrine, or else "dear."
"I wish we could think he wanted to see us!" remarked Miss Tyndale.
"I hope he didn't notice the basins," added Miss Vedrine
"I think we hid them with our trains," said Miss Carroll.
"Was he nice looking?" Miss Vedrine had courage to ask. She had wonderful red hair, only a little darker at the roots, and long, straight black eyelashes. A few of these had come off on her cheeks, but they were not noticeable at a distance.
"I don't know, I'm sure, dear," replied Miss Devereux, a fawn-eyed brunette, who was nearest the door. "There wasn't time to see. I just thought: 'Good heavens! have we got to parade?' Then, 'No, thank goodness, it's a man!' And he was gone."
"What should we do if a woman did come, and we had to get up?" wondered Miss Vedrine, whose great specialty was her profile and length of white throat.
"She wouldn't be a woman; she'd be a monster, to care about clothes in weather like this," pronounced the golden-haired Miss Carroll. "Parade indeed! I wouldn't. I'd simply lie down and expire."
"I feel I've never till now sympathized enough with the animals in the ark," said Miss Child, who had not chosen her own name, or else had shown little taste in selection, compared with the others. But she was somehow different, rather subtly different, from them in all ways; not so elaborately refined, not so abnormally tall, not so startlingly picturesque. "One always thinks of the ark animals in a procession, poor dears--showing off their fur or their stripes or their spots or something--just like us."
"Speak for yourself, if you talk about spots, please," said Miss Devereux, who never addressed Miss Child as "dear," nor did the others.
"I was thinking of leopards," explained the fifth dryad. "They're among the few things you can think of without being sick."
"I can't," said Miss Devereux, and was. They all were, and somehow Miss Child seemed to be the one to blame.
"We were just getting better!" wailed Miss Vedrine.
"It was only a momentary excitement that cheered us," suggested Winifred Child.
"What excitement?" they all wanted indignantly to know.
"That man looking in."
"Do you call that an excitement? Where have you lived?"
"Well, a surprise, then. But would we have been better if it had been madame who looked in?"
The picture called up by this question was so appalling that they shuddered and forgot their little grudge against Miss Child, who was not so bad when you were feeling well, except that she had odd ways of looking at things, and laughed when nobody else could see anything to laugh at.
"Thank heaven, she's a bad sailor!" Miss Devereux cried.
"Thank heaven, all the other women on board are bad sailors," added Win.
"If madame was well she'd think we ought to be," said Miss Carroll. "She'd dock our pay every time we--- Oh, this is bad enough, but if she was well it would be a million times worse!"
"Could anything be worse?" Miss Tyndale pitifully questioned, for just then the ship was sliding down the side of a wave as big as a millionaire's house.
"Yes, it would be worse if we were wearing our waists slender this year," said Win.
"Down,