To resume, Dear Dairy; having uterly failed with Hannah, and having shortly after met Sis on the stairs, I said to her, in a sisterly tone, intimite rather than fond: 

“I darsay you can lend me five dollars for a day or so.”

“I darsay I can.  But I won’t,” was her cruel reply.

“Oh, very well,” I said breifly.  But I could not refrain from making a grimase at her back, and she saw me in a mirror.

“When I think,” she said heartlessly, “that that wreched school may be closed for weeks, I could scream.”

“Well, scream!” I replied.  “You’ll scream harder if I’ve brought the meazles home on me.  And if you’re laid up, you can say good-bye to the Dishonorable.  You’ve got him tide, maybe,” I remarked, “but not thrown as yet.”

(A remark I had learned from one of the girls, Trudie Mills, who comes from Montana.)

I was therfore compeled to dispose of my silver napkin ring from school.  Jane was bought up, she said, and I sold it to the cook for fifty cents and half a minse pie although baked with our own materials.

All my Fate, therfore, hung on a paltrey fifty cents.

I was torn with anxiety.  Was it enough?  Could I, for fifty cents, steel away from the sordid cares of life, and lose myself in obliviousness, gazing only it his dear Face, listening to his dear and softly modulited Voice, and wondering if, as his eyes swept the audiance, they might perchance light on me and brighten with a momentary gleam in their unfathomable Depths?  Only this and nothing more, was my expectation.

How diferent was the reality!

Having ascertained that there was a matinee, I departed at an early hour after luncheon, wearing my blue velvet with my fox furs.  White gloves and white topped shoes completed my outfit, and, my own chapeau showing the effect of a rainstorm on the way home from church while away at school, I took a chance on one of Sis’s, a perfectly madening one of rose-colored velvet.  As the pink made me look pale, I added a touch of rouge.

I looked fully out, and indeed almost Second Season.  I have a way of assuming a serious and Mature manner, so that I am frequently taken for older than I realy am.  Then, taking a few roses left from the decorations, and thrusting them carelessly into the belt of my coat, I went out the back door, as Sis was getting ready for some girls to Bridge, in the front of the house.

Had I felt any greif at decieving my Familey, the bridge party would have knocked them.  For, as usual, I had not been asked, although playing a good game myself, and having on more than one occasion won most of the money in the Upper House at school.

I was early at the theater.  No one was there, and women were going around taking covers off the seats.  My fifty cents gave me a good seat, from which I opined, alas, that the shop girl had been right and busness was rotten.  But at last, after hours of waiting, the faint tuning of musicle instruments was heard.