Winnie Childs | Page 3

crimson and purple.
"Funny! I should think not!" snorted a fantasy in emerald.
"It makes me worse to hear you laugh," squealed a radiance in rose.
"I wish we were all dead, especially Miss Child," snarled the last of the
five, a symphony in black and all conceivable shades of blue. Because
of this combination, the Miss Child in question had named her the
"Bruise."

"Sorry! I'll try not to laugh again till the sea 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withdrawn and the door closed.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.