It was hard to believe that Anne was real, a girl, and not a doll, walking. Ariel remembered the hateful dolls which had for some time now been an offense to her sensibilities and her father’s in gift-shop windows in Hamilton and St. George’s. This girl brought them vividly to mind: dangling yard-long legs that could be tied in knots after they were crossed at the knees, black hair parted in a seam down the exact middle of the head and whirled into tight sleek buttons over the ears, crazy outstanding wirelike eyelashes, dead-white cheeks, magenta mouths warped by the paint brush into an eternal leer. But from these horrid images you were shielded by the glass of shop windows. Never had Ariel dreamed that she would become involved with a living one.
The magenta lips opened. Words fell out. “Well, hello, Ariel Clare. Were you seasick?”
The deep throaty voice with the catch in it only heightened the doll effect.
Ariel shook her head negatively, and stepping backward, crouched down on the side of the bed as Anne clumped a step or two nearer. “Congratulations,” the magenta lips husked on. “It’s almost time for the dinner gong. Where’s your bag? Oh, there!”
The mules clumpety-clumped to the suitcases which Hugh had unstrapped for Ariel before he left her, and throwing back their covers Anne began tossing the things inside about as roughly as the inspector on the pier had done. “Dinner dress?” she inquired. “You’ve just time to change.”
“There it is. The green!” Ariel spoke hurriedly, to stop the useless mauling of her delicate possessions.
Anne jerked out the green frock. “Rather nice,” she approved. “Clever.” As she tossed it to Ariel she caught sight of the coat. “My word! But you are a gorgeous baby—! What a duck, what a _lamb_ of a coat! You lucky, lucky girl!” She snatched it up from the bed and held it ecstatically before her person, and turned to look at it in the mirror of the door. Ariel did not know what to do. She wanted to tell Anne that it was a gift from her brother. But she couldn’t. For suddenly, and for the first time, the gift rather troubled her. It was too much. Hugh should never have done it.
While Ariel hesitated, Anne had dropped the coat and turned to sit in front of Ariel’s dressing table. Delicately, with the tips of first the jewel-nailed little finger of one hand, then the other, she began to work at the contours of her painted lips, pointing up the cynical expression. The color was so recently applied that it was still malleable. As she worked at this delicate bit of art she talked, a steady flow of words, but thrown out all in that halting, throaty manner that made it seem not so much real speech from a real person as goblin talk.