Reading practice 51
PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from Susan Coolidge's novel, What Katy Did © 1872.
The September sun was glinting cheerfully into a pretty bedroom furnished with blue. It danced on the glossy hair and bright eyes of two girls, who sat together hemming ruffles for a white muslin dress. The half-finished skirt of the dress lay on the bed, and as each crisp ruffle was completed, the girls added it to the snowy heap, which looked like a drift of transparent clouds or a pile of foamy white of egg beaten stiff enough to stand alone.
These girls were Clover and Elsie Carr, and it was Clover's first evening dress for which they were hemming ruffles. It was nearly two years since a certain visit made by Johnnie to Inches Mills and more than three since Clover and Katy had returned home from the boarding school at Hillsover.
Clover was now eighteen. She was a very small Clover still, but it would have been hard to find anywhere a prettier little maiden than she had grown to be. Her skin was so exquisitely fair that her arms and wrists and shoulders, which were round and dimpled like an infant's, seemed cut out of daisies or white rose leaves. Her thick, brown hair waved and coiled gracefully about her head. Her smile was peculiarly sweet, and the eyes, always Clover's chief beauty1, had still that pathetic look which made them quite irresistible to anyone with a tender or sympathetic heart.
Elsie, who adored Clover, considered her as beautiful as girls in books, and was proud to be permitted to hem ruffles for the dress in which she was to burst upon the world. Though, as for that, not much "bursting" was possible in the village of Burnet, where tea parties of a middle-aged description and now and then a mild little dance, represented "gaiety" and "society." Girls "came out" very much as the sun comes out in the morning—by slow degrees and gradually, so that no one moment could be fixed upon as having been the climax of the joyful event.
