After Annette had served mine and Bess’s chocolate in Bess’s bedroom we settled down to the real seriousness of trousseau talk, which lasted for many long hours.

“Now if I sell you back all the things of yours I haven’t worn for two hundred and fifty dollars that will leave you over three hundred in the bank to get a few wash frocks and hats and things to last you until you are enough married to Matthew to use his money freely,” said Bess after about an hour of discussion and admiration of her own half-finished trousseau.

“Yes; I should say those things would be worth about two hundred and fifty dollars now that they are third-hand,” I answered Bess’s excited eyes, giving her a look of well-crusted affection, for there are not many women in the world, with unlimited command of the material that Bess has, who would not have offered me a spiritual hurt by trying to give me back my thousand dollars’ worth of old clothes which she had not needed in the first place when she bought them.

“Now, that’s all settled, and we’ll begin to stretch that three hundred dollars to its limit.  We won’t care if things do tear, just so they look smart until you and Matthew get to New York.  Matthew won’t be the first bridegroom to go into raptures over a thirty-nine-cent bargain silk made up by a sixty-dollar dressmaker.  I’m giving Owen a few deceptions in that line myself.  That gray and purple tissue splits if you look at it, and I got it all for three dollars.  Felicia made it up mostly with glue, I think, and I will be a dream in it—­a dream that dissolves easily.  Let’s go shopping.”  As she thus led me into the maze of dishonest trousseau-buying, Bess began to ring for Annette.

Of course most women in the world will refuse to admit that shopping can arouse them from any kind of deadness that the sex is heir to, but a few frank ones, like myself, for instance, will say such to be the case.  For three weeks I gave myself up to a perfect debauch of clothes, and ended off each day’s spree by dancing myself into a state of exhaustion.  Everybody in Hayesville wanted to give Bess and me parties, and most of them did, that is, as many as we could get in at the rate of three a day between dressmakers and milliners and other clothing engagements.  Owen got perfectly furious and exhausted, but Matthew kept in an angelic frame of mind through it all.  I think the long days with Polly out in the open helped him a lot, though at times I detected a worried expression on the faces of them both, and I felt sure that they were dying to tell me that it had been a case of the razor from Rufus’ shoe between him and the Belgian or that the oil was of the grade that explodes incubators, but I gave them no encouragement and only inquired casually from time to time if the parental twins were alive.  Polly even tried me out with a bunch of roses, which I knew came from the old musk clump in the corner of the garden which I had seen rebudded, but I thanked her coldly and immediately gave them to Belle’s mother.  I saw Matthew comforting her in the distance, and his face was tenderly anxious about me all the rest of the evening.