ed acres with house, furniture,
and stock. She went on in ignorance of what had happened until after
Sunday dinner the following day. Then she had planned to visit Agatha
and Adam. It was very probable that it was because she was dressing
for this visit that Nancy Ellen decided on Kate's enlightenment, for
she could not have helped seeing that her sister was almost stunned at
times.

Kate gave her a fine opening. As she stood brushing her wealth of gold
with full-length sweeps of her arm, she was at an angle that brought
her facing the mirror before which Nancy Ellen sat training waves and
pinning up loose braids. Her hair was beautiful and she slowly smiled
at her image as she tried different effects of wave, loose curl, braids
high piled or flat. Across her bed lay a dress that was a reproduction
of one that she had worn for three years, but a glorified reproduction.
The original dress had been Nancy Ellen's first departure from the
brown and gray gingham which her mother always had purchased because it
would wear well, and when from constant washing it faded to an exact
dirt colour it had the advantage of providing a background that did not
show the dirt. Nancy Ellen had earned the money for a new dress by
raising turkeys, so when the turkeys went to town to be sold, for the
first time in her life Nancy Ellen went along to select the dress. No
one told her what kind of dress to get, because no one imagined that
she would dare buy any startling variation from what always had been
provided for her.

But Nancy Ellen had stood facing a narrow mirror when she reached the
gingham counter and the clerk, taking one look at her fresh, beautiful
face with its sharp contrasts of black eyes and hair, rose-tinted skin
that refused to tan, and red cheeks and lips, began shaking out
delicate blues, pale pinks, golden yellows. He called them chambray;
insisted that they wore for ever, and were fadeless, which was
practically the truth. On the day that dress was like to burst its
waist seams, it was the same warm rosy pink that transformed Nancy
Ellen from the disfiguration of dirt-brown to apple and peach bloom,
wild roses and swamp mallow, a girl quite as pretty as a girl ever
grows, and much prettier than any girl ever has any business to be.
The instant Nancy Ellen held the chambray under her chin and in an
oblique glance saw the face of the clerk, the material was hers no
matter what the cost, which does not refer to