The superintendent's tucked-in lips and her whole taut figure visibly
relaxed. "I _used_ to have nice hair," she admitted in the time-hallowed
formula. "I wish you could have seen it four years ago. It's come out
something terrible! Well," she made a virtue of it--"I never spend any
time fussing with it."

"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I
adore doing hair. Please sit down--I just want to try something with
it--something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into
a stiff chair.

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly
neat top drawer.

"Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to
give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,--see, like this? No, it
wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be
thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your
prayers,--and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you
looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers
flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of
your face? Wait,--where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word!
Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It
won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?"

"Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she
had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry.

"And--do you mind my saying these things?--I've always bullied my friends
about their clothes and colors--I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and
navy blue."

"I always supposed _white_ was right for every one."

"It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt
orange--Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I
never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people."

"Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin
quivered.

"Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her
voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come
some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans--_if_ my play goes
over----"

But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up
speed like a motor as it ran--she had kept her word to Hope House. She
became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous
lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote imp