Susan Coolidge

What Katy Did Next Susan Coolidge

The September sun was glinting cheerfully into a pretty bedroom furnished with blue. It dancedon the glossy hair and bright eyes of two girls, who sat together hemming ruffles for a white muslindress. The half-finished skirt of the dress lay on the bed; and as each crisp ruffle was completed, thegirls added it to the snowy heap, which looked like a drift of transparent clouds or a pile of foamywhite-of-egg beaten stiff enough to stand alone. These girls were Clover and Elsie Carr, and it was Clover's first evening dress for which theywere hemming ruffles. It was nearly two years since a certain visit made by Johnnie to Inches Mills, of which some of you have read in "Nine Little Goslings;" and more than three since Clover andKaty had returned home from the boarding-school at Hillsover. Clover was now eighteen. She was a very small Clover still, but it would have been hard to findanywhere a prettier little maiden than she had grown to be. Her skin was so exquisitely fair that herarms and wrists and shoulders, which were round and dimpled like a baby's, seemed cut out ofdaisies or white rose leaves. Her thick, brown hair waved and coiled gracefully about her head. Hersmile was peculiarly sweet; and the eyes, always Clover's chief beauty, had still that pathetic lookwhich made them irresistible to tender-hearted people. Elsie, who adored Clover, considered her as beautiful as girls in books, and was proud to bepermitted to hem ruffles for the dress in which she was to burst upon the world. Though, as forthat, not much "bursting" was possible in Burnet, where tea-parties of a middle-aged description, and now and then a mild little dance, represented "gayety" and "society." Girls "came out" verymuch, as the sun comes out in the morning, -by slow degrees and gradual approaches, with noparticular one moment which could be fixed upon as having been the crisis of the joyful event."There," said Elsie, adding another ruffle to the pile on the bed, -"there's the fifth done. It'sgoing to be ever so pretty, I think. I'm glad you had it all white; it's a great deal nicer.""Cecy wanted me to have a blue bodice and sash," said Clover, "but I wouldn't. Then she triedto persuade me to get a long spray of pink roses for the skirt.""I'm so glad you didn't! Cecy was always crazy about pink roses. I only wonder she didn't wearthem when she was married!"Yes; the excellent Cecy, who at thirteen had announced her intention to devote her whole life toteaching Sunday School, visiting the poor, and setting a good example to her more worldlycontemporaries, had actually forgotten these fine resolutions, and before she was twenty hadbecome the wife of Sylvester Slack, a young lawyer in a neighboring town! Cecy's wedding andwedding-clothes, and Cecy's house-furnishing had been the great excitement of the preceding year inBurnet; and a fresh excitement had come since in the shape of Cecy's baby, now about two monthsold, and named "Katherine Clover," after her two friends. This made it natural that Cecy and heraffairs should still be of interest in the Carr household; and Johnnie, at the time we write of, wasmaking her a week's vi