et, and the ripping
began.

"And you can wear Kid's new pearl necklace and pink scarf, and my silk
stockings and slippers--if you can get 'em on--and I think Conny left a
lace petticoat that came back from the laundry too late to
pack--and--Here's Kid now!"

Miss McCoy's sympathies were enlisted and in fifteen minutes the task of
transforming a remonstrating, excited, and occasionally tearful Harriet
into the school beauty, was going gaily forward. Kid McCoy was supposed
to be an irreclaimable tomboy, but in this crucial moment the eternal
feminine came triumphantly to the fore. She sat herself down, with
Patty's manicure scissors, and for three-quarters of an hour
painstakingly ripped out tucks.

Patty meanwhile addressed her attention to Harriet's hair.

"Don't strain it back so tight," she ordered. "It looks as though you'd
done it with a monkey-wrench. Here! Give me the comb."

She pushed Harriet into a chair, tied a towel about her neck, and
accomplished the coifing by force.

"How's that?" she demanded of Kid.

"Bully!" Kid mumbled, her mouth full of pins.

Harriet's hair was rippled loosely about her face, and tied with a pink
ribbon bow. The ribbon belonged to Conny Wilder, and had heretofore
figured as a belt; but individual property rights were forced to bow
before the cause.

The slippers and stockings did prove too small, and Patty frenziedly
ransacked the bureaus of a dozen of her absent friends in the vain hope
of unearthing pink footwear. In the end, she had reluctantly to permit
Harriet's appearing in her own simple cotton hose and patent leather
pumps.

"But after all," Patty reassured her, "it's better for you to wear
black. Your feet would be sort of conspicuous in pink." She was still in
her truthful mood. "I'll tell you!" she cried, "you can wear my silver
buckles." And she commenced cruelly wrenching them from their pink
chiffon setting.

[Illustration: Patty meanwhile addressed her attention to Harriet's
hair.]

"Patty! _Don't!_" Harriet gasped at the sacrilege.

"They're just the last touch that your costume needs." Patty ruthlessly
carried on the work of destruction. "When your father sees those
buckles, he'll think you're _beautiful_!"

For a feverish hour they worked. They clothed her triumphantly in all
the grandeur that they could command. The entire corridor had
contributed its quota, even to the lace-edged handkerchief with a
hand-embroidered "H" that had been left behi