bundle of things, with
her compliments--a little box with a cake of lovely white chalk in it;
another, smaller yet, filled with a pink powder that looks like ground
rose-leaves, and a bottle with something liquid and dark in it, which
does not seem as if it was good to drink. What on earth does Cousin E.
E. expect me to do with these things?

Ah! pinned to the bundle, I find a letter, beginning "Dear Cousin
Phoemie," and asking me to excuse her, but she sends the things,
thinking that I may want to rejuvenate, and perhaps dye, before I go to
the ball.

Rejuvenate! Does she mean to say that I'm not young enough? and if I
wasn't, how are these things a-going to help me? I know that girls in
school sometimes eat chalk and chew gum, but never heard that they got
the younger for it. Then the pink powder--well, it's no use calculating
about it, especially as she wants me to die after it. I wish Cousin E.
E. would ever learn to spell. When a woman dies she does not do it with
a "y" as a general thing.

Now what _does_ all this mean?

I was doing my hair at the looking-glass, when Cousin E. E. came in,
looking like a queen; her blue silk dress was all spotted with gold
flowers, and it streamed out half across my bedroom. Over that she wore
a long white cloak, with tassels to it, and her hair was looped in with
pink roses that were not redder than her cheeks, which would have
satisfied me that her health was first-rate, if it hadn't been for the
shadows that lay around her eyes, which had grown awfully dark since I
saw her at home.

"Oh!" says she, "I am just in time. Came early, thinking you might want
help. Sit down; that will do. Now where is the you-know-what--those
boxes--you understand?"

Here E. E. flung off her cloak and came to the glass. I declare to you
the creature's neck was white as any snow-drift but uncovered to an
extent that frightened me out of a week's growth. Her arms, too, were
the same, and bare as her neck. She had a narrow pink shoulder-strap,
and some lace between them, and that was all; only a string of white
stones, that shone like a rainbow now and then, was around her neck and
one arm; two or three of the same kind of stones hung down from her
ears, and shot out light from her hair.

The whiteness of that neck astonished me, and made me look every which
way.

E. E. didn't seem to mind that, but took off her long white gloves and
laid them on the table; then she snatched up one of the boxe