Most people rather liked the face Phyllis saw in the mirror; but to her
own eyes, fresh from the dazzling vision of that Eva Atkinson who had
been dowdy and stupid in the far-back time when seventeen-year-old
Phyllis was "growin' up as pretty as a picture," the tired,
twenty-five-year-old, workaday face in the green glass was _dreadful_.
What made her feel worst--and she entertained the thought with a
whimsical consciousness of its impertinent vanity--was that she'd had so
much more raw material than Eva! And the world had given Eva a chance
because her father was rich. And she, Phyllis, was condemned to be tidy
and accurate, and no more, just because she had to earn her living. That
face in the greenish glass, looking tiredly back at her! She gave a
little out-loud cry of vexation now as she thought of it, two hours
later.
"I must have looked to Eva like a battered bisque doll--no wonder she
couldn't place me!" she muttered crossly.
And it must be worse and more of it now, because in the interval between
two and four there had been many little sticky fingers pulling at her
sleeves and skirt, and you just _have_ to cuddle dear little library
children, even when they're not extra clean; and when Vera Aronsohn
burst into heartbroken tears on the Liberry Teacher's blue woolen
shoulder because her pet fairy-book was missing, she had caught several
strands of the Teacher's yellow hair in her anguish, much to the hair's
detriment.
It was straight, heavy hair, and it would have been of a dense and
fluffy honey-color, only that it was tarnished for lack of the constant
sunnings and brushings which blonde hair must have to stay its best
self. And her skin, too, that should have been a living rose-and-cream,
was dulled by exposure to all weathers, and lack of time to pet it with
creams and powders; perhaps a little, too, by the very stupid things to
eat one gets at a dairy-lunch and boarding-house. Some of the assistants
did interesting cooking over the library gas-range, but the Liberry
Teacher couldn't do that because she hadn't time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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