"But you ought to, you know! Let me play with it a minute, will you? I adore doing hair. Please sit down--I just want to try something with it--something I thought of as I watched you to-day." She pressed her into a stiff chair. "Well ..." said Miss Ellis grudgingly. She produced a comb from a bleakly neat top drawer. "Heavens, what neatness," said Jane. "And the brush, please! You ought to give it a hundred and twenty strokes a night,--see, like this? No, it wouldn't be wasting time! Just consider the good thoughts you could be thinking. You could memorize poetry or dates in history or say your prayers,--and you'd say a prayer of thankfulness in a year, when you looked at the result. It would shine like patent leather." Her fingers flew. "There! Now you can look. See how it brings out the good lines of your face? Wait,--where's your hand mirror? You haven't one? My word! Well, you can get the idea, even so! Will you try doing it this way? It won't take but a minute longer. Just to please me?" "Well ..." she couldn't seem to think of anything else to say, and she had a ridiculous feeling that she might be going to cry. "And--do you mind my saying these things?--I've always bullied my friends about their clothes and colors--I do wish you wouldn't wear white, and navy blue." "I always supposed _white_ was right for every one." "It's wicked for most people! Cream, buff, tan, apricot, burnt orange--Let me come down and go shopping with you some day, will you? I never cared about dressing dolls but I revel in dressing people." "Well ..." said Miss Ellis once more, and this time her stubborn chin quivered. "Shall we go downstairs?" Jane moved ahead of her, her eyes averted, her voice cheerfully commonplace. "Simply torrid up here, isn't it? I'll come some cool morning, and we'll make lists and plans--_if_ my play goes over----" But before her gay little play had been running three months, picking up speed like a motor as it ran--she had kept her word to Hope House. She became the Lady Bountiful of the bathtubs and linoleums, of the frivolous lay pictures and the autumn shaded lamps, and she wrote impudently to Sarah Farraday that when she looked upon all that she had created she saw that it was very good. Even Emma Ellis has undergone a sea change; she's learned to do her hair decently, and I've actually persuaded her that while it's quite right to let her light so shine before men, it's different with her nose, and you can't think what a dusting of flesh-colored powder does for her! And I've got her out of blue serge and white blouses, and into cream and buff and orange and brown, and I daresay Michael Daragh will now fall in love with her excellent qualities and her enhanced appearance, and I shall lose my best friend. (E.E. would never allow friendships.) I shall probably wish I'd left her in her state of Ugly Ducklingness, for I simply can't spare St. Michael from my scheme of things!