“I ’m going to be vain, Mrs. Bird!” cried Polly, with compunction in her voice.  “I ’ve never had a real beautiful, undyed, un-made-over dress in my whole life, and I shall never have strength of character to own four at once without being vain!”

This speech was uttered through the crack of the library door, outside of which Polly stood, gathering courage to walk in and be criticised.

“Think of your aspiring nose, Sapphira!” came from a voice within.

“Oh, are you there too, Edgar?”

“Of course I am, and so is Tom Mills.  The news that you are going to ‘try on’ is all over the neighborhood!  If you have cruelly fixed the age limit so that we can’t possibly get in to the performances, we are going to attend all the dress rehearsals.  Oh, ye little fishes! what a seraphic Sapphira!  I wish Tony were here!”

She was pretty, there was no doubt about it, as she turned around like a revolving wax figure in a show-window, and assumed absurd fashion-plate attitudes; and pretty chiefly because of the sparkle, intelligence, sunny temper, and vitality that made her so magnetic.

Nobody could decide which was the loveliest dress, even when she had appeared in each one twice.  In the lilac and white crepe, with a bunch of dark Parma violets thrust in her corsage, Uncle Jack called her a poem.  Edgar asserted openly that in the Christmas toilet he should like to have her modeled in wax and put in a glass case on his table; but Mrs. Bird and Tom Mills voted for the Quaker gray, in which she made herself inexpressibly demure by braiding her hair in two discreet braids down her back.

“The dress rehearsal is over.  Good-night all!” she said, as she took her candle.  “I will say ‘handsome is as handsome does’ fifty times before I go to sleep, and perhaps—­I only say perhaps—­I may be used to my beautiful clothes in a week or two, so that I shall be my usual modest self again.”

“Good-night, Polly,” said the boys; “we will see you to-morrow.”

“‘Pauline,’ if you please, not ‘Polly.’  I ceased to be Polly this morning when the circulars were posted.  I am now Miss Pauline Oliver, story-teller by profession.”

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE CHILDREN’S HOUR:  REPORTED IN A LETTER BY AN EYE-WITNESS.

It was the last Monday in March, and I had come in from my country home to see if I could find my old school friend, Margaret Crosby, who is now Mrs. Donald Bird, and who is spending a few years in California.

The directory gave me her address, and I soon found myself on the corner of two beautiful streets and before a very large and elegant house.  This did not surprise me, as I knew her husband to be a very wealthy man.  There seemed to be various entrances, for the house stood with its side to the main street; but when I had at last selected a bell to ring, I became convinced that I had not, after all, gone to the front door.  It was too late to retreat, however, and very soon the door was opened by a pretty maid-servant in a white cap and apron.