Lanice's appearance. 'You won't have such poor taste as to wear that costume! Green, with fur!'
'Oh, but it is very simple. I thought...'
'You thought,' jerked out Pauline, 'that it made you look pretty. Well, I don't see why a caged artist, or whatever you call such things, needs to look pretty. Mrs. Stowe has done a world of good in the plainest of old alpacas. Do Mrs. Morgan or Miss Gatherall wear green with fur? Do any great intellectual women, except'—she added in a whisper—'George Sand? Now I'd go up and put on your brown merino. It looks much more like cultured Boston.'
'I don't want to look like cultured Boston. I want to look like myself. And Mamma always insisted that I wear pretty gowns and have hats and gloves to go with everything.'
Pauline, still extraordinarily ugly from her weeping, said in a slow, cutting voice, 'I suppose you would like to look like your mother; act like her too, perhaps.'
This hurt. Lanice sprang to her feet, staring blankly at her cousin and looking surprisingly like a child's stiff doll in her voluminous green gown and tumbled black silk curls. 'Sometimes,' she said, her voice shaking with anger, 'you are horrid, Pauline. You can be horrider than any one else I have ever known. You can't love me or you wouldn't talk to me like that. I think you really hate me, and my dear Mamma.'
Wrangle, wrangle. Her nerves trembled with the confusion and bickering.
