places, and a lack of personal restraint which allowed him all the joys the infantile mind can revel in!
At Dolly's exclamation Toinette rushed at him in his stronghold, and extricated him from the coal-box with demonstrations of dismay.
“Look at his white dress!” she wailed pathetically. “I only put it on a few minutes ago; and he has eaten two dozen fusees, if this was n't an empty box when he found it. I hope they won't disagree with him, Phil.”
“They won't,” said Phil, composedly. “Nothing does. Dust him, and proceed to business. I want to hear the rest of Dolly's story.”
“I think,” said Mollie, “that he ate Shem and Ham this morning, for I could only find Japheth after he had been playing with his Noah's Ark. Go on, Dolly.”
“Wait until I have taken off my things,” said Dolly, “and then we 'll talk it over. We must talk it over, you know, if I am to go.”
She took off her hat, and then laid her shawl aside,—a little scarlet shawl, draped about her figure and tossed over one shoulder smartly, and by no means ungracefully,—and so stood revealed; and it must be admitted she was well worth looking at. Not a beauty, but a fresh, wholesome little body, with a real complexion, an abundance of hair, and large-irised, wide-awake eyes, changeable as to color, because capricious in expression; the sort of girl, in fact, who would be likely to persuade people ultimately that, considering circumstances, absolute beauty could be easily dispensed with, and, upon the whole, would rather detract from the general charm of novelty, which, in her case, reigned supreme.
“It is n't the mere fact of being a beauty that makes women popular,” she would say; “it's the being able to persuade people that you are one,—or better than one. Don't some historians tell us that Cleopatra had red hair and questionable eyes, and yet she managed to blind the world so completely, that no one is sure whether it is true or not, and to this day the generality of people are inclined to believe that it was her supernatural beauty that dragged Marc Antony to the dust at her feet.”
Aimée's face was more nearly perfect than Dolly's; Mollie's was more imposing, child as she
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