Frieda made Beth proper in her blue suit, with its underlying hint of gray. Aunt Alida, artistically studying Beth’s eyes, had chosen blue in Beth’s new outfit wherever she could, but there were so many shades and kinds of the color that Beth wondered. Here was the blue of the sky in April, with a drooping hat of a lighter shade of the same blue, with long loops of ribbon velvet of a much darker shade, and a soft bunch of ostrich tips, like the ribbon, in the front. Beth saw that it was most becoming to her. She turned away from a long survey of the effect with a laugh and a blush. “It is nice to be pretty, Frieda,” she said frankly. “I never was before, and I sha’n’t be when I go home, but while it lasts it is about the nicest thing in the world to be pretty.” “You ought not to talk that way to Frieda, so confidingly, Beth,” Alys rebuked her as they went to the elevator. “Oh, Frieda knows; she saw the things Miss Tappan made for me, and she knows,” said Beth lightly. She was too content to mind what Alys thought, suddenly feeling perfectly sure of herself. “I think it’s silly to try to cover up anyway, Alys. People always see through you,” she added. Natalie laughed. “You’re a funny little thing, Beth,” she said. “Sometimes you seem about seven years old, and then you say something as old as sixteen--like that.” “It’s because I’ve always been a good deal by myself. I think when you don’t know many girls you keep little, yet then older people make you old, only differently,” explained Beth, with correct understanding of her own case but not the clearest way of stating it. She looked at Natalie, glowing in her brown cloth, with the tawny touch of red in her hat, and her soft brown furs, at Alys in sage green with her white hat and its green plumes, then she looked again at her own blue figure in the elevator mirrors. Aunt Alida was better than a fairy godmother; she certainly knew how to dress her girls. In the hall below they found Dirk awaiting them, the image of Sunday correctness, brushed and shining in his dark clothes with his bright scarf, and an innocent look of peace on his round face that entirely misrepresented his state of mind. The carriage was waiting and they heard Mr. Cortlandt hurrying his wife for the horses’ sake; the wind was sharp. Pretty Aunt Alida came down the stairs all in soft gray, gown, coat, hat and furs. She swayed in a flower-like way as she walked; Beth thought there never was such a lovely creature. She thought it so earnestly that her eyes declared her thought, and her Aunt Alida stooped to kiss her. “We all look beautiful,” Beth said as her uncle came down also, in the dignity of long coat, gray gloves and gray tie. He threatened Beth with his silk hat. “Get out with you, you base flatterer!” he cried, driving her before him down the steps. The three girls sat opposite to Mrs. Cortlandt and her husband, Dirk between his father and mother.