Dressmaking often lightened her black moments; it was to her an exciting form of creation. It had been quickly and casually done, but it had turned out well. Round her neck she wore the silliest little string of bright blue-glass beads, which someone had once given a doll of Antonia's in the dead past when Antonia played with dolls, and which Antonia herself occasionally wore. Antonia had left them in Pearl's room, for her new-found personal neatness did not as yet extend to the care of her possessions, and in an impulse Pearl had put them on and found the result good. So did Antonia.
"Oh, see!" she said as they sat down at table. "She has on my beads."
"Fancy Miss Exeter wearing someone else's beads!" said Edna in a tone hard to mistake for a friendly one.
"But don't they look well on her?" said Antonia. "Uncle Tony, don't you think they look well on her? How could you describe her as 'of pleasing appearance'? It nearly made me miss her at the station that first day. I went dodging about, trying to find a pale, plain girl--that's what mother told me to look for. I think Miss Exeter is beautiful, don't you?"
"Antonia!" said her mother scornfully, as if nonsense were being talked.
Anthony, however, never allowed his niece to put him in a hole.
"I certainly do," he said, and he looked straight at Pearl, and she