it approached perilously near hypocrisy!

"I don't care!" she told herself recklessly; but she did care all the
same, and her heart gave a throb of relief when on the morning of what
had come to be known in the family as "Blouse day," Arthur announced his
intention of asking both the Darcy brothers to dinner.

"After your hard work you ought to have an audience to admire and
applaud," he said, "and I shall tell them we want them particularly.
They were asking how your dressmaking was getting on the other day, so I
am sure they will be glad to accept. You won't want an answer, I
suppose, Mistress Housekeeper? They can return with me or not, as the
case may be?"

"Certainly! Certainly! It makes no difference," said Peggy loftily;
and thus it happened that the girls went upstairs to dress that evening
without knowing who would be waiting to receive them when they made
their entrance into the drawing-room. The blouses were laid out in the
dressing-room which connected the two bedrooms, and to a casual glance
there was no doubt which was the more successful. The one could boast
no remove from the commonplace, the other was both artistic and
uncommon, a garment which might have come direct from the hands of a
French _modiste_. Eunice's face fell as she looked, and she breathed a
sigh of depression.

"Oh, Peggy, how horrid mine looks beside yours! What a mean, skimpy
little rag! I am ashamed to appear in it. You will look beautiful,
perfectly beautiful! You have done it splendidly."

Peggy gave a murmur of polite disclaimer, and pursed in her lips to
restrain a smile.

"Wait until they are on, dear. You can never tell how a thing looks
until it is on," she said reassuringly; but alas, for Peggy, little did
she dream how painfully she would discover the truth of her own words.

A quarter of an hour later Eunice was hooking the front of her bodice,
when the door burst open and in rushed Peggy, red in the face, gasping
for breath, her neck craned forward, her arms sticking out stiffly on
either side, for all the world like a waxen figure in a shop window.

"My neck!" she gasped. "My sleeves! They torture me! My arms are
screwed up like sausages. The collar band cuts like a knife. I'm like
a trussed fowl--I'll burst! I know I shall! I'll die of asphyxiation.
What shall I do? What shall I do? What can have happened to make it
like this?"

"Oh dear! oh dear! You do look uncomfortable. It was big eno