himself
on one elbow to look about.

Very close to him, sitting upon the divan in the shadow, was a girl
wearing a dress of beautiful silk. She was crying softly, her face in
her hands.

IV

THE DISASTER

Ariel had worked all the afternoon over her mother's wedding-gown, and
two hours were required by her toilet for the dance. She curled her
hair frizzily, burning it here and there, with a slate-pencil heated
over a lamp chimney, and she placed above one ear three or four large
artificial roses, taken from an old hat of her mother's, which she had
found in a trunk in the store-room. Possessing no slippers, she
carefully blacked and polished her shoes, which had been clumsily
resoled, and fastened into the strings of each small rosettes of red
ribbon; after which she practised swinging the train of her skirt until
she was proud of her manipulation of it. She had no powder, but found
in her grandfather's room a lump of magnesia, that he was in the habit
of taking for heart-burn, and passed it over and over her brown face
and hands. Then a lingering gaze into her small mirror gave her joy at
last: she yearned so hard to see herself charming that she did see
herself so. Admiration came and she told herself that she was more
attractive to look at than she had ever been in her life, and that,
perhaps, at last she might begin to be sought for like other girls.
The little glass showed a sort of prettiness in her thin, unmatured
young face; tripping dance-tunes ran through her head, her feet keeping
the time,--ah, she did so hope to dance often that night!
Perhaps--perhaps she might be asked for every number. And so, wrapping
an old waterproof cloak about her, she took her grandfather's arm and
sallied forth, high hopes in her beating heart.

It was in the dressing-room that the change began to come. Alone, at
home in her own ugly little room, she had thought herself almost
beautiful, but here in the brightly lighted chamber crowded with the
other girls it was different. There was a big cheval-glass at one end
of the room, and she faced it, when her turn came--for the mirror was
popular--with a sinking spirit. There was the contrast, like a picture
painted and framed. The other girls all wore their hair after the
fashion introduced to Canaan by Mamie Pike the week before, on her
return from a visit to Chicago. None of them had "crimped" and none
had bedecked their tresses with artificial flowers. Her alter