"Pshaw! I suppose she'll be a wondrous sight in her 'best bib and tucker.' Loaded down with silver ornaments, like a Mexican belle at a fair, or an Indian squaw at a poodle-dog feast. She will undoubtedly throw all us girls in the shade," and Sue burst into a gale of laughter. "I declare! you're cruel, Sue!" cried one of the girls from Amarillo. "I'd like to know how you make that out, Miss?" demanded the girl from Boston. "Frances has never done you a bit of harm. Why! you are accepting her hospitality this very moment. And yet, you haven't a good word to say for her." "I don't see that I am called upon to give her a good word," sneered Miss Latrop. "She is a rough, rude, quite impossible person. I fail to see wherein she deserves any consideration at my hands. I declare! to hear you girls, one would think this cowgirl was of some importance." Frances came quietly away from the window, postponing her dusting in that quarter until later. But she was tempted--very sorely tempted indeed. Sue expected her to look like a cross between an Indian squaw and a Mexican belle at dinner--and Frances was sorely tempted to fulfil the Boston girl's idea of what a "cattle queen" should look like at a society function! CHAPTER XXVIII THE BURSTING OF THE CHRYSALIS Frances Durham Rugley was growing up. At least, she felt a great many years older now than she did that day so short a time before when, riding along the trail, she had heard Pratt and the mountain lion fighting in Brother's Coulie. She looked at her reflection in the long dressing-mirror in her own room, and could not see that she had added to her stature in this time "one jot or tittle." But inside she felt worlds older. It was the afternoon of the dinner-party day. She had come upstairs to make ready to receive her guests. The dinner was for seven and Frances had given herself plenty of time to dress. Pratt was off on his pony, "getting the stiffness out of himself," he declared. The old Captain was just as busy as a bee, and just as fussy as a clucking hen, about the last preparations for the party. And meanwhile Frances was undecided. She almost wished she might run away from the ordeal before her. To face all these people whom, after all, she knew so slightly, and play hostess at her father's table, and be criticised by them all, was an ordeal hard for the range girl to face. She was not particularly shy; but she shrank from unkind remarks, and she was sure of having at least one critic-extraordinary at the table--Sue Latrop. This was really Frances' "coming out party" but she didn't want to "come out" at all! "Oh! I wish they had never come here. I wish daddy had not asked them to this dinner. Dear me!" groaned the girl of the ranges, "I almost wish I had never met Pratt at all."