Jennie Clark arrived duly and was received, if not rapturously,
at least hospitably. To be frank, Jennie Clark was not among
those first suggested by Dorothea as a prospective visitor. Of
her own private and particular friends some five had been
rejected by a too censorious parent, mainly, it seemed, because
of a lack of personal charm--Dorothea preferring a good sport
from the gutter, as it were, to a dull fairy from a dancing
school.

Jennie had been near, perilously near, the end of Dorothea's
list. Her sole claims to Dorothea's friendship were that, living
next door, she was available on rainy days when greater delights
failed, and that Dorothea, by a dramatic relation of a ghost
story, could hypnotize her into a terrified and wholly fascinated
wreck.

Jennie was thirteen, a very young thirteen--pretty and mindless
as a Persian kitten--but developing rapidly a coquettish instinct
for the value of a red ribbon in her dark curls, and the set of a
bracelet on her plump arm. Beside her curves and curls and pretty
frilled frocks, Dorothea, in her straight, blue flannel playing
suit or stiff afternoon pique', with her cropped blonde head,
suggested nothing so much as wire opposed to a sofa cushion.

She was in white pique' this afternoon. To meet one's friend at
the station was an event. Dorothea was honestly excited and
happy, and she was not at all pained that Jennie Clark's first
greeting was a comment on her short hair and her sunburn.

By what might have seemed to the unobserving a happy coincidence,