"Well, I wish you could have seen her trying her new hat on to-day!"
Georgie would contribute. And both girls would kneel at the window
as long as the bedroom in the next house was lighted. "Gone down to
meet that man in the light overcoat," Susan would surmise, when the
light went out, and if she and Georgie, hurrying to the bakery,
happened to encounter their neighbor, they had much difficulty in
suppressing their mirth.

To-night the room that the cousins shared was empty, and Susan threw
her hat and coat over the foot of the large, lumpy wooden bed that
seemed to take up at least one-half of the floor-space. She sat down
on the side of the bed, feeling the tension of the day relax, and a
certain lassitude creep over her. An old magazine lay nearby on a
chair, she reached for it, and began idly to re-read it.

Beside the bed and Georgie's cot, there was a walnut bureau in the
room, two chairs and one rocking chair, and a washstand. One the
latter was a china basin, half-full of cold, soapy water, a damp
towel was spread upon the pitcher that stood beside it on the floor.
The wet pink soap, lying in a blue saucer, scented the room. On the
bureau were combs and brushes, powders and cold creams, little brass
and china trays filled with pins and buttons, and an old hand-
mirror, in a loosened, blackened silver mounting. There was a glazed
paper candy-box with hairpins in it, and a little liqueur glass,
with "Hotel Netherlands" written upon it in gold, held wooden collar
buttons and odd cuff-links. A great many hatpins, some plain, some
tarnished and ornate, all bent, were stuck into a little black china
boot. A basket of china and gold wire was full of combings, some
dotted veils were folded into squares, and pinned into the wooden
frame of the mirror, and the mirror itself was thickly rimmed with