Miss Ada was overjoyed. She shepherded Glen upstairs and waited nervously through the period of bathing and brushing, and then slipped the slim yellow dress over her head. “At last you are wearing it!” she exulted. It was rather of a tender subject between them, the little yellow-buff crêpe de chine. Miss Ada, by the exercise of much innocent guile, had contrived an invitation for Glen to attend the New Year’s reception at her Cousin Amos Tenafee’s, and then, knowing that the child had not sufficiently gala raiment, went to the smart little shop in the Bella Vista and dipped recklessly into her shallow bank account. But Glen would not go. She was stirred and touched and grateful, but she couldn’t go to the pleasures and palaces of The Hill--The Hill which had broken her mother’s heart, her soft-eyed, soft-chinned mother; The Hill which her father had damned with his dying breath. Miss Ada, passionately desiring a fuller and richer life for her charge, came at last to see that it must come from without, not from the sacred inner circle, and she relinquished all hope of ever hearing her dear Cousin Amos, high priest and head of the clan, say--“And this is our young friend, Miss Glen Darrow, the protégée of our dear Cousin Ada.” Her remodeled desire, thereafter, took the form of distinguished strangers who would see at once the beauty and worth of her child, and she prayed for it nightly, with simple fervor. Miss Ada’s god was, after all, a tribal god: when she said--‘_Our Father, which art in heaven_,’ she had in mind a composite likeness of her own dear father and Cousin Amos, somewhat magnified and glorified, but with the same essential standards and sympathies, and it was necessary, therefore, to pray very earnestly and persuasively to have the child of an obscure (and truculent) Chicago physician receive any special favors. Janice Jennings might seem, at first glance--a glance staggered by her beaded lashes and her mauve cheeks and her cerise mouth--an unlikely instrument of Providence, but Miss Ada was well aware that fathers, on earth and in heaven, moved in mysterious ways their wonders to perform, and she saw Glen off for the Bella Vista with misty eyes and a pounding heart. CHAPTER IX _Glen Darrow dines for the first time in her life and tells her hostesses her opinion of Peter Parker of Pasadena; later confides to her sleepless pillow that she doesn’t like being touched._ OLD Mrs. Jennings, who welcomed her granddaughter’s guest very cordially, wore an orchid dinner gown and an orchid complexion. Her face had at once an oddly tense and expectant look overlaid by a doll-like blankness.