And then he attacked her poor head with ferocious familiarity. If Poppa had ever caught him, and her, he’d certainly have shot them both. Momma was in for it, however, and she actually permitted this strange man, this appalling foreigner, to take down her hair, drench it, soap it, souse her head in water, pour curious smelly things over her scalp, and rinse them out, massage her occiput, comb and pull and torture and iron her hair and dress it on top of her astounded skull in what he called a “French twist.” She spent a whole hour of “feeling like a shirt in a steam laundry,” as she afterward expressed it. Then he brandished before her a mirror and uttered a triumphant cry of something that sounded like: “Ah, my damn, walla, walla!” Momma blushed vermilion and felt as immoral as she looked. Yet not at all remorseful, somehow. Fortunately Franswa dashed out to prepare the hair of Ella, leaving Momma to ponder her new face and her new hair with a new soul. She felt that, in Hattie’s formula, she ought to be ashamed of herself, but, to save her immortal being, she could not. Only one thing she was sure of, and that was that that head and that hair did not belong on top of that old dress of hers. Her one “best dress” was the one worst dress she had ever seen. When at length she saw Ella, Ella screamed with delight at the transformation and said something that rimed: _Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be._ The afternoon was spent in shopping for what Ella called “landjerree.” Until she had the proper underpinnings, Ella simply refused to buy Mattie the new dress and hat she was already clamoring for. The amount of Poppa’s money that Ella spent on silken shamelessness dazed Momma, but Ella would not be checked, and Momma was too childishly interested in the new doll rags to make more than a show of resistance. Ella said: “If your husband has money enough to waste ten thousand dollars on my husband’s foolish investments, he has money enough to buy you some decent underclothes.” “Did you say ‘decent’?” was Momma’s feeble disclaimer, but she barely muttered it. That night, on a plea of going to bed early, Momma locked herself in her room and tried on the new things. She nearly died of palpitation of the heart when she stood up in silk stockings, satin mules, and in a new streamline corset that gave her a figure! A heroic figure indeed, but a shape, a contour, that was not altogether an insult to the Creator who fashioned it. Momma had to give it a religious significance to live through it. * * * * *