"No; mama did."
"Oh," said she.
I didn't just like the sound of that "Oh," so I asked her aggressively
if she didn't think my dress was nice. She answered:
"I think you've got the prettiest hair of any girl I ever knew."
My hair _did_ look attractive, and I was otherwise quite satisfied with
my appearance. What is more, I was too polite to let her know what I
thought of _her_ appearance. Although it was March, she, poor thing,
had put on a flimsy little muslin dress. Of course it was suffocatingly
hot in our close little state-room, but, still, that seemed an absurd
dress to wear on a boat. I offered to lend her a knitted woolen scarf
that mama had made me to throw over her shoulders, but she shook her
head, and we went up on deck.
To my unutterable surprise, I found a metamorphosis had taken place on
deck during my four days' absence. Every one appeared to be dressed in
thin white clothes; even the officers were all in white duck. Moreover,
the very atmosphere had changed. It was as warm and sultry as
midsummer, and people were sipping iced drinks and fanning themselves!
Slowly it dawned upon me that we were sailing toward a tropical land.
In a hazy sort of way I had known that the West Indies was a warm
country, but I had not given the matter much thought. My father, who
had been all over the world, had left my outfitting to mama and me (we
had so little with which to buy the few extra things mama, who was more
of a child than I, got me!), and I had come away with clothes fit for a
land which often registered as low as twenty-four degrees below zero!
My clothes scorched me; so did my burning shame. I felt that every
one's eyes were bent upon me.
Both Captain Hollowell and Mr. Marsden greeted me cordially, expressing
delight at seeing me again, but although the captain said (in a big,
booming voice that every one on deck could hear) that I looked like a
nice, blooming peony, I sensitively fancied I detected a laugh beneath
his words.
Tragedies should be measured according to their effects. Trifles prick
us in youth as sharply as the things that ought to count. I sensitively
suffered in my pride as much from the humiliation of wearing my heavy
woolen clothes as I physically did from the burden of their weight and
heat. I was sure that I presented a ridiculous and hideous spectacle.
I felt that every one was laughing at me. It was insufferable; it was
torture.
As soon as I could get away from that joking captain, who _would_ keep
patting me on the head, and that purser, who was always smiling and
showing his white teeth, I ran down to my room, which I had hoped to
see as little of as possible for the rest of the voyage.
I sat down on the only chair and began to cry. The ugly little room,
with its one miserable window, seemed a wretched, intolerable prison. I
could hear the soughing of the waves outside, and a wide streak of blue
sky was visible through my port-hole window. The moving of the boat and
the thud of the machinery brought home to me strongly the fact that I
was being carried resistlessly farther and farther away from the only
home I had ever known, and which, alas! I had yearned to leave.
It was unbearably hot, and I took off my woolen dress. I felt that I
would never go on deck again; yet how was I going to endure it down
here in this little hole? I was thinking miserably about that when my
room-mate came back.
"Well, here you are!" she exclaimed. "I've been looking for you
everywhere! Now what's the matter?"
"N-nothing," I said; but despite myself the sob would come.
"You poor kid!" she said. "I know what's the matter with you. I don't
know what your folks were thinking of when they sent you off to the
West Indies in Canadian clothes. Are they all as simple as you there?
But now don't you worry. Here, I've got six pretty nice-looking
shirt-waists, besides my dresses, and you're welcome to any of them you
want. You're just about my size. I'm thirty-four."
"Thirty-four!" I exclaimed, astonished even in the midst of my grief.
"Why, I thought you were only about twenty."
"Bust! Bust!" she cried, laughing, and got her waists out and told me
to try them on. I gave her a kiss, a big one, I was so delighted; but I
insisted that I could not borrow her waists. I would, however, buy some
of them if she would sell them.
She said that was all right, and she sold me three of them at a
dollar-fifty each. They fitted me finely. I never felt happier in my
life than when I put on one of those American-made shirt-waists. They
were made sailor-fashion, with wide turnover collars and elbow sleeves;
with a red silk tie in front, and with my blue cloth skirt, I really
did look astonishingly nice, and, anyway, cool and neat. The fact that
I now possessed only two dollars and fifty cents in the world gave me
not the slightest worry, and when I ran out of my room, humming, and up
the stairs and bang into the arms of Captain Hollowell, he did not say
this time that I looked like a peony, but that, "By George!" I looked
like a nice Canadian rose.