Here, she thought triumphantly, was something before which the Zabrowsky spirit would break down. It did not in any way suggest the useful, serviceable, humiliating, charitable devotion. It was gay and festive, palpably a gift, and Teacher, with many misgivings but some hope, submitted it to Becky's consideration. She represented that she had herself outgrown it, that she had no costume with which it could appropriately be worn, that it was menaced by moths, a prey to creases, and a responsibility under which she could no longer find peace or security. Under the circumstances, she pleaded, would Becky relieve her of it? And Becky was delighted, translated, enchanted. She would never allow that cape to hang with the ordinary outdoor apparel of the other members of the class. It rested in her desk when she was busy, and she lulled it in her arms when she was not. Before coming into this shining fortune she had been rather looked down upon by other members of the class, and had avoided publicity in every possible way. She had with chattering teeth and livid lips assured her more warmly clad classmates that she was "all times too hot on the skin," and that her mamma considered her Sunday coat too stylish to wear at school. But, girded in blue velvet, she was another child. Once the most retiring of the class, she now became the least so. Once the most studious, she now yearned to be sent on outpost duty, on small shopping expeditions for her teacher, to the Principal's office, or to other class rooms with notes or with new students. And upon all these expeditions she wore an air of conscious correctness and the royal-blue velvet cape. She had once been the most truthful of small persons, but the glory of the cape tinged everything, and she allowed the other children to infer--nay, she even definitely stated--that this was the Sunday coat earlier referred to, and that she was wearing it to school because it had been superseded by another even more wonderful. Her auditors were too impressed to be unconvinced, and, to cover her very literal nakedness in every other respect, she invented for herself an entirely new disease. "Say, Becky," one of the little girls in her class asked her, "don't you never put yourself on mit underwear nor underclothes? Ain't you scared you should to get cold in your bones? My mamma, she puts me on mit all from wool underwear--costs twenty-seven cents a suit by Grand Street--and I puts them on when the school opens, and I don't takes them off to the fourth of July." "Oh," retorted Becky, with more truth than she knew, "it ain't so awful healthy you should make like that. My mamma says it is healthy for me the wind shall come on my skin. She says sooner no wind comes outside of your skin, no blood could go inside of your skin. And don't you know how teacher says what somebody what ain't got blood going in them is dead ones?" "Und you _likes_," marvelled her friend, "you _likes_ the wind shall blow on you?"