ll find that tail in the way; it's good enough for
a schoolgirl, but you aren't that any longer. I'll get Dinah to do your
hair, something simple and not too grown-up--you don't mind an old woman
telling you this--do you?"

"Indeed I don't," said Phyl. "I don't care how my hair is done, you can
cut it off if you like, but I don't want to go to parties."

"Well, maybe you don't," said Miss Pinckney, "but, all the same, we'll get
Dinah to look to your hair. Dinah can do most anything in that way; she'd
get twice the wages as a lady's maid elsewhere and she knows it, but she
won't go. I've told her over and again to be off and better herself, but
she won't go, sticks to me like a mosquito. Well, this was Juliet's room
just as that's her picture; she died in that bed and everything is just
exactly as she left it. It was kept so after her death. You see, it wasn't
like an ordinary person dying, it was the tragedy of the whole thing that
stirred folk so, dying of a broken heart for the man she was in love with.
It set all the crazy poets off like that clock of Selina Pinckney's I was
telling you of. The _News and Courier_ had yards of obituary notice and
verses. It made people forget the war for a couple of days. There's all
her books on that shelf and the diary the poor thing used to keep. Open
one of the drawers in that chest."

Phyl did so. The drawer was packed with clothes neatly folded. The air
became filled with the scent of lavender.

"There are her things, everything she ever had when she died. It may seem
foolish to keep everything like that, foolish and sentimental, and if
she'd died of measles or fallen down the stairs and killed herself maybe
her old things would have been given away, but dying as she did--well,
somehow, it didn't seem right for coloured girls to be parading about in
her things. Mrs. Beamis sniffed here just as she sniffed in the
drawing-room, and she said, one night, something about sentiment, as if
she was referring to chicken cholera. I knew what she meant. She meant we
were a pack of fools. Well, she ought to know. I reckon she ought to be a
judge of folly--the life she leads in Chicago. Umph!--Now I'm going to lie
down for an hour, and if you take my advice you'll do the same. The middle
of the day was meant to rest in. You can get to your room by the window."

She kissed Phyl and went off.

Phyl, instead of going to her room, took her seat in the rocker and looked
around her. The place