But it's hard to count on a family. Mother sprained her ankle getting
out of the car that night and was laid up for three days. I chafed at
first. Henry might change his mind or one of the eleven get in some
fine work. We declined everything that week, and I made some experiments
with my hair and the aid of mother's maid. I wanted a sort of awfully
feminine method--not sappy but not at all sophisticated. Toots
Warrington is always waved and netted, and all the girls by that time
had got earrings and were going round waved and netted too.
I wanted to fix my hair like a girl who slips her hand into a man's coat
pocket because she can't help it, and then tries to get it out, and
can't because his hand has got hold of it.
Then one night I got it. Henry had dropped in, and found mother with her
foot up and the look of a dyspeptic martyr on her face, and father with
a cold and a thermometer in his mouth.
"I've come to take Kit to the movies," he announced calmly. "Far be it
from me not to contribute to the entertainment of a young lady who is
just out!"
"Full of gerbs!" father grunted, referring to the movies of course, not
me. But mother agreed.
"Do take her out, Henry," she said. "She's been on my nerves all
evening."
So we went, and there was a girl in one of the pictures who had exactly
the right hair arrangement. She had it loose and wavy about her face,
and it blew about the way things do blow in the movies, and in the back
it was a sort of soft wad.
It shows the association of ideas that I found my hand in Henry's coat
pocket, and he grabbed it like a lunatic.
"You darling!" he said thickly. "Don't do that unless you mean it. I
can't stand it."
I had to be very cool on the way home in the motor or he would have
kissed me.
Mother and I went to a reception on the following Tuesday, and I
wondered if mother noticed. She did. Coming home in the motor she turned
and stared at me.
"Thank heaven, Kit," she said, "you still look like a young girl. All at
once Ellie and the others look like married women. Earrings! It's
absurd. And such earrings! I am quite sure," she went on, eying me,
"that some of them had been smoking. I got an unmistakable whiff of it
when I was talking with Bessie Willing."
Well, I had rinsed my mouth with mouth wash and dabbed my lips with
cologne, so she got nothing from me. But I tasted like a drug store.
I am not smoking now. I am not doing much of anything. I--but I'm coming
to that.
I'm no hypocrite. I'd been raised for one purpose, and that was to marry
well. If I did it in my own way, and you think my way not exactly
ethical, I can't help it. This thing of sitting back and letting
somebody find you and propose to you is ridiculous. There is only one
life, and we have to make the best we can of it.
Ethical! Don't girls always have the worst of it anyhow? They can't go
and ask the man. They have to lie in wait and plan and scheme, or get
left and have their younger sisters come out and crowd them, and at
twenty-five or so begin to regard any man at all as a prospect. Maybe my
methods sound a bit crude, but compared with the average girl I know, I
was delicate. I didn't play up my attractions, at least not more than
was necessary. I was using my mind, not my body.