"Your dress, Nell, was a perfect success," the other ran on--"perfect. How did you think mine looked? I'll tell you a compliment I got for you, if you'll tell me one you got for me. If not, I'll save it up in my secret breast till you're ready to make a trade." "To think," said Mrs. Hawthorne, still engrossed by her dream of absent and bygone things, "that we're the same little girls--and one of them barefoot!--who used to play house together on a sand-heap of old Cape Cod and pin on any old rag that would tail along the ground and play ladies! 'My dear Mrs. Madison, how do you do?'" "'My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, my toes are just as sore as they can be!'" "'That comes, my dear Mrs. Madison, of you dancing like a crazy woman from ten o'clock till one, in tight shoes!'--Mrs. Hawthorne! Mrs. Madison! Aurora! Estelle! To think, after all these years, we should be playing our old play that we played at Wellfleet and East Boston, only playing it with real things, in Paris and Florence!" "Nell, I'm so afraid of forgetting and calling you Nell that every time I catch myself near doing it I can feel the cold sweat break out on my brow." "What would it matter? We aren't impostors, Hat. We're just having fun, and don't want our real names to queer it. If they should slip out when we aren't thinking, they'd simply sound like nicknames we've got for each other. But they won't slip out. I'm too fond of calling you Estelle. Don't you _love_ to call me Aurora? Hat, how did I behave, far as you could see?" "Nell, if I hadn't known you, and had just been seeing you for the first time, I should have said to myself: 'What a fine, good-looking, beautifully dressed, refined, and ladylike woman that is! Wish t' I might make her acquaintance.' And what would you have said, if you'd seen me, never having met me before?" "I should have said: 'What a bright, smart, intelligent, and rarely beautiful girl! So well dressed, too, and slender as a worm! A queen of society. I do like her looks! She's the spittin' image of my little friend Hattie Carver, the schoolmarm in East Boston, that I used to know!' Oh, Hat, the _queerest_ thing! What do you suppose I saw this evening at that lovely house full of lovely people? I was in the library learning to dance. And I looked up and there was what I took to be a young man smoking a cigarette. Next thing, I saw that his dress was low-necked almost down to the waist. Hat, it was a _woman_ smoking! a woman with her hair cut short. I never saw anything like it, except an old Irishwoman once, with her pipe." "Seems to me I've heard of ladies in Europe doing it, and it being considered all right. I _have_ heard that some do it in New York, but I guess they're careful not to be seen." "Well, it does seem a queer thing to do!--Go ahead, Hat; what was the compliment?" "Sure, now, you've got one for me?" "Sure."