Mrs. Tiralla was a very good dancer, and her heart beat as she unpacked the ball-dress her husband had ordered for her from a fashionable dressmaker in Posen. She could very well have worn her blue silk again if the rats had not been nibbling it! However, this filmy white gauze, with its long flowing sash and a small bouquet of artificial roses for the bodice and another for the hair, was certainly much prettier; there was an underskirt of silk, too, which rustled and swished every time she moved. Mrs. Tiralla was dressing in the large sitting-room on the ground floor. The bedroom upstairs was too cold, so Marianna had brought the looking-glass down and had fixed it up on a table by means of some pieces of wood, and placed two lighted candles in front of it. Mrs. Tiralla was doing her own hair. The Gradewitz dressmaker would have been asked to do it, as she was also the hairdresser of the neighbourhood, but she had taken offence when she heard that Mrs. Tiralla had got her ball-dress from Posen. [Pg 86] Mrs. Tiralla did not crimp her hair as a rule, but to-day she got a waving-iron, and she and Marianna did it together. The maid was by no means clumsy, although she had such big hands, and she helped her mistress to pile up her wavy hair at the top of her head. But when at last it was ready, Mrs. Tiralla thought it so hideous, that she burst into tears and tore it down with an angry "_Psia krew!_" which made Rosa shrink. The child was crouching in a dark corner of the room with her hands clasped round her knees, gazing with admiration at the beautiful vision in the white embroidered petticoat. Ugh! how difficult it was to please the mistress this evening; now she wanted this, now that. If Marianna had not consoled herself with the thought that she would soon be mistress of the house for a whole night, she would have cried instead of laughing pleasantly as she was doing now. "Pani must do her hair in her usual way," she said. "That suits Pani best of all." "She is right," sighed Mrs. Tiralla, as she began once more to comb out her tangled hair, and she tore at it so savagely that at last her silky, black tresses clung to her white temples in big, smooth waves. Then she twisted the plaits in a huge coil at the nape of her neck; that was the way she had worn her hair in her girlhood, and that suited her best. "By Jove, you look like a little girl, my love," smirked her husband from his seat, on the bench near the stove, where he was lying as usual in spite of his clean shirt, black coat, and hair covered with pomade. "Many people will envy me to-night." She did not answer; she felt annoyed with him. Wasn't it disgraceful of him to lie there in his new, clean clothes, just as though he had his greasy, everyday coat on? [Pg 87]