"I know, mama." Alice looked troubled, but shook her head. "It
can't be helped this time; you'll need every minute to get that
dress done."

Mrs. Adams went away lamenting, while Alice, no expert, began
to splash the plates and cups and saucers in the warm water.
After a while, as she worked, her eyes grew dreamy: she was
making little gay-coloured pictures of herself, unfounded
prophecies of how she would look and what would happen to her that
evening. She saw herself, charming and demure, wearing a fluffy
idealization of the dress her mother now determinedly struggled
with upstairs; she saw herself framed in a garlanded archway, the
entrance to a ballroom, and saw the people on the shining floor
turning dramatically to look at her; then from all points a rush
of young men shouting for dances with her; and she constructed a
superb stranger, tall, dark, masterfully smiling, who swung her
out of the clamouring group as the music began. She saw herself
dancing with him, saw the half-troubled smile she would give him;
and she accurately smiled that smile as she rinsed the knives and
forks.

These hopeful fragments of drama were not to be realized, she
knew; but she played that they were true, and went on creating
them. In all of them she wore or carried flowers--her mother's
sorrow for her in this detail but made it the more important--and
she saw herself glamorous with orchids; discarded these for
an armful of long-stemmed, heavy roses; tossed them away for a
great bouquet of white camellias; and so wandered down a
lengthening hothouse gallery of floral beauty, all costly and
beyond her reach except in such a wistful day-dream. And upon