“GOOD HEAVENS! Betsey Pogany!” cried Aunt Sarah, and then poured forth
such a torrent of reproaches as Betty had never heard. The “good
heavens!” in itself was a volume. Betty had once been sent to bed
supperless for saying it, being told it was the same as swearing. And
the blast of scorn and wrath that followed might have been a torrent
of good heavenses. But though it was the worst outburst Betty had ever
heard, she minded it the least. And this wasn’t at all because of the
vision in the mirror. It was because of the other vision--the vision
of Rose Harrow--that Betty endured the onslaught almost unscathed. And
even when her father came down to breakfast, and Aunt Sarah turned to
him to make the expected plea, Betty’s heart didn’t sink as she had
believed it must.
“George, will you look at that girl! Will you take just one look at
your only daughter, George Pogany!” his sister adjured him dramatically.
George Pogany, a very tall, gaunt, rather hard-featured man, obediently
turned his eyes upon his daughter, though he sighed inwardly; for he
hated a fuss, especially on Sunday mornings. As he gazed, an expression
of wonderment appeared upon his thin, lined face, to be succeeded by
a sort of perplexity through which a vague gratification struggled to
emerge.
“Bless my heart! Whatever have you been doing, Betty!” he exclaimed
kindly. “As I live, you’ve been growing smaller. She doesn’t look near
so big and fat, does she, Sarah?”
Miss Pogany could only snort, and he went on unheeding:
“And your hair--I’d forgot you had such pretty hair--and long--my
goodness! What have you gone and done all of a sudden, child?”
His sister stared at him in speechless amazement. Betty herself was
almost as astonished.
“I just braided it, instead of pugging it up, and tied it with a
ribbon,” she said with gentle eagerness. “Do you really like it so,
father?”
“I like it amazing,” he said promptly. “You don’t look so grown-up.”
They sat down to the table. Pogany continued to gaze at his daughter.
But his brow clouded.
“What I want to know is how you happened to lose flesh so? It looks a
heap better, and yet--I wouldn’t have you starve yourself, Betty. Have
you been trying any such wicked doings?” he demanded.
Betty laughed almost wildly. Her aunt snorted again. She dropped the
coffee pot as if she feared to trust herself with it and clasped her
hands.
“George Pogany! Are you clean out of your head?” she demanded. “Can’t
you see? Where are your eyes? Fat--why, the girl looks like a barrel. A
_barrel_! Look at her waist! What do you say to the size of it?”
He looked at Betty’s waist. “Yes, it’s a right smart way round it,
Sarah,” he acknowledged. “And yet, somehow, Betty don’t look so
big--not near. I could have sworn she’d lost pounds, and that sash
shows off all the better.”
He looked musingly at the wide, soft silk scarf. Then he looked at
Betty’s sweet, flushed face.
“When you were little, Betty, and your mother was living, she used
to tie the bow behind. I remember how it hung down as far as some
little scallops that edged the bottom of your little white dress,” he
remarked, his harsh voice pitched low. “Perhaps you couldn’t reach
round to tie it so?”
“O yes, I can, father; I can reach anywhere now! I’ll change it so
before church,” the girl declared.
“Church,” echoed Miss Pogany. “Church! Don’t think you’ll be allowed to
go to church looking like that, young lady. I’d be ashamed to have you
step outside the door, such a fright as you are. I shouldn’t like you
to go as far as the hen-coop.”
Betty was as much amazed by her own boldness as she was by her father’s
attitude, though later she realized that the former depended upon the
latter. She seemed now to be listening to some other girl speaking in
cool determined accents.
“O, I’ll change and wear my good skirt, but I have shortened that,
too,” she said. “And I’m always going to wear my hair down. It feels so
much better, and father likes it.”
“I’m sure I don’t know what’s come over you, Betty Pogany!” gasped Aunt
Sarah. “It’s perfectly disgraceful! Tell me, George, are you going to
allow that impudent girl to go to church with her clothes almost up to
her knees and without her corsets?”
Pogany’s face was transfixed with horror.
[Illustration: “Bless my heart! Whatever have you been doing, Betty?”]
“Corsets!” he echoed hoarsely. “Do you mean to tell me, Sarah, that my
daughter wears corsets--and she only twelve years old! I never heard
the like!”
“George Pogany! of course she does. She’s worn them for more than two
years now. She has to, of course. Anyone as fat as Betty has to wear
corsets,” declared Miss Pogany.
“Not if I know it,” he retorted indignantly. “Betsey, as soon as
you have eaten your breakfast you go straight upstairs and take off
those corsets, and don’t you ever let me hear of your wearing any
such foolish things again until you are eighteen years old. Do you
understand?”
“Yes, father,” said Betty, “and like as not you won’t hear of it even
when I’m eighteen.”
An hour after breakfast, as George Pogany, dressed in his Sunday
clothes, sat stiffly by the window waiting to accompany his sister and
daughter to church, Betty stole up behind him, put her arms about his
neck, and shyly kissed him.
“You’re so good, father,” she said softly. “I am so happy because you
don’t mind my braiding my hair and--not being so grown-up.”
She slipped out shyly. George Pogany’s heart beat quickly. He couldn’t
remember that his only child had come to him thus and kissed him since
she had been a toddling baby. Something strange seemed to have taken
place. Instead of the big, overgrown daughter he had been secretly
rather ashamed of, he seemed to have seen this morning the little
girl she would naturally have been at her age. And pretty, too, she
was, surprisingly pretty--touchingly so, in truth, to George Pogany,
though he didn’t realize it. He couldn’t understand it at all, nor
why his throat seemed husky. But in any event, the practical hardware
merchant came to a practical conclusion. He had already looked ahead
to the autumn when Betty would enter the high school at Paulding with
her class with two railroad fares a day to be paid; and he had decided
that to the weekly total of ninety cents she should contribute the
twenty-five cents she had for pin money. Now he said to himself that he
would pay her fares and she should have her allowance for hair-ribbons
or sweets. And perhaps, being in the high school, she ought to have it
increased.