His face had puckered up again. Then suddenly it unpuckered. "Tell
you what you might do," he solved it. "Just take 'em along and send
them to your mother. Now your mother might be real glad to have
'em."

Virginia stared. And then an awful thing happened. What she was
thinking about was the letter she could send with the stockings.
"Mother dear," she would write, "as I stood at the counter buying
myself some stockings to-day along came a nice man--a stranger to
me, but very kind and jolly--and gave me--"

There it was that the awful thing happened. Her dimple was
showing--and at thought of its showing she could not keep it from
showing! And how could she explain why it was showing without its
going on showing? And how--?

But at that moment her gaze fell upon the clerk, who had taken the
dimple as signal to begin putting the stockings in a box. The
Frenchwoman's eyebrows soon put that dimple in its proper place.
"And so the _petite Americaine_ was not too--oh, not _too_--" those
French eyebrows were saying.

All in an instant Virginia was something quite different from a
little girl with a dimple. "You are very kind," she was saying, and
her mother herself could have done it no better, "but I am sure our
little joke had gone quite far enough. I bid you good-morning". And
with that she walked regally over to the glove counter, leaving red
and grey and black hosiery to their own destinies.

"I loathe them when their eyebrows go up," she fumed. "Now