Get together on the lists! Martie's heart closed over the phrase
with a sort of spasm of pleasure. She and Rodney conferring--
arranging! The bliss--the dignity of it! She would have considered
anything, promised anything.

Grace was gone now, and generous little Sally still ahead of them in
the shadows. Martie said a quick, laughing good-night, and ran to
join her sister just before Sally opened the side gate. It was now
quite dark.

The two girls crossed the sunken garden where clumps of flowers
bloomed dimly under the dark old trees, gave one apprehensive glance
at the big house, which showed here and there a dully lighted
window, and fled noiselessly in at the side door. They ran through a
wide, bare, unaired hallway, and up a long flight of unlighted
stairs that were protected over their dark carpeting by a worn brown
oilcloth.

Sally, and Martie breathless, entered an enormous bedroom, shabbily
and scantily furnished. The outline of a large walnut bedstead was
visible in the gloom, and the dark curtains that screened two bay
windows. Across the room by a wide, dark bureau, a single gas jet on
a jointed brass arm had been drawn out close to the mirror, and by
its light a slender woman of twenty-seven or eight was straightening
her hair. Not combing or brushing it, for the Monroe girls always
combed their hair and coiled it when they got up in the morning, and
took it down when they went to bed at night. Between times they only
"straightened" it.