She sat up late that night, doing improving things to the white net waist that went with her best suit, which was black. As her needle nibbled busily down the seams she continued happily to wonder about that Entirely Different Line. It sounded to her more like a reportership on a yellow journal than anything else imaginable. Or, perhaps, could she be wanted to join the Secret Service?
"At any rate," she concluded light-heartedly, as she stitched the last clean ruching into the last wrist-covering, sedate sleeve, "at any rate I'll have a chance to-morrow to wear mother's gold earrings that I mustn't have on in the library. And oh, how lovely it will be to have a dinner that wasn't cooked by a poor old bored boarding-house cook or a shiny tiled syndicate!"
And she went to bed--to dream of Entirely Different Lines all the colors of the rainbow, that radiated out from the Circulation Desk like tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line--a very hard one to walk--there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where she was to be.
When Phyllis woke next morning everything in the world had a light-hearted, holiday feeling. Her Sundays, gloriously unoccupied, generally did, but this was extra-special. The rain had managed to clear away every vestige of last week's slush, and had then itself most unselfishly retired down the gutters. The sun shone as if May had come, and the wind, through the Liberry Teacher's window, had a springy, pussy-willowy, come-for-a-walk-in-the-country feel to it. She found that she had slept too late to go to church, and prepared for a joyful dash to the boarding-house bathtub. There might be--who knew but there actually might be--on this day of days, enough hot water for a real bath!
"I feel as if everything was going to be lovely all day!" she said without preface to old black Maggie, who was clumping her accustomed bed-making way along the halls, with her woolly head tied up in her Sunday silk handkerchief. Even she looked happier, Phyllis thought, than she had yesterday. She grinned broadly at Phyllis, leaning smilingly against the door in her kimona.