That same season there was another notable occasion, when Hallie led me to the bedroom of her grown-up sister, and exhibited to me with awe-struck pride the dress her sister was to wear to the Sumner Light Guards' ball that night. It was a blue tulle with a fine frost of spangles over the bodice, and it seemed too dazzling to belong to a creature less wonderful than a fairy. But when Hallie went on, in a cautious whisper lest we be discovered, to confide to me that when she was grown up and out of school her mother had promised to give her a party, and that, since I was her best friend, of course she was going to invite me first of all, I began to realize that I, too, might some day grow up into a young lady, and be laced into a gown perhaps as beautiful as the one spread out on the bed before us. Such a dazzling idea gave me an entirely new set of fancies, and was a pleasant book companion and bedfellow to take back to the convent. Hallie, who was a year older and half a head taller than I, had already begun to lengthen her dresses, and do up her hair, and I found it humiliating to be so small that at sixteen I had still to wear mine down my back in long curls, and my skirts above my ankles. The only thing that comforted me was that whenever father came to see me he always said: "Child, how tall you are! You're almost a woman!" and though he was the one person who seemed to think so it was quite sufficient for me. When my graduation day came I was much excited to think how absolutely grown-up I would appear to him in my first long frock, but when I came to him after the exercises were over, he looked at me as if he were sad, and said, "Child, how little you are!" That was a dreadful disappointment to me, but when I reminded him how he had always told me I was tall, he laughed, and said: "You were tall for a school-girl, but you're very little to be the mistress of a house." That puzzled me; but on the way home, driving up through the valley, he told me more about what he meant. He said, "Now that you have stopped being a child you are going to be a very gay young lady; going to have fine gowns, and dance about like a butterfly; and you're going to keep on being my little girl; but at the same time I am afraid you will have to be a little lady of the house, too, and take care of me, and Abby--now that Abby's rheumatism is so bad--and go to call on the ladies who were your mother's friends, and are going to be yours. Do you think you are tall enough to do all that?" I was so surprised and so happy that I hugged him right there in the buggy, and said: "Do you really mean it?" Father laughed, just as he does to cover up being rather serious, and said: "You are your mother's daughter, for she was a little fair woman, but there was never anything too big for her to manage."