Mrs. Purdy had the most beautiful illusions about everything. She seemed to see her fellow-men not as they were, but as God intended them to be. She discovered so many latent virtues and attractions in her new probationers that they scarcely knew themselves.
When, for instance, she made the startling observation that Nance had wonderful hair, and that, if she washed it with an egg and brushed it every day, it would shine like gold, Nance was interested, but incredulous. Until now hair had meant a useless mass of tangles that at long intervals was subjected to an agonizing process of rebraiding. The main thing about hair was that it must never on any account be left hanging down one's back. Feuds had been started and battles lost by swinging braids. The idea of washing it was an entirely new one to her; but the vision of golden locks spurred her on to try the experiment. She carefully followed directions, but the egg had been borrowed from Mrs. Smelts who had borrowed it some days before from Mrs. Lavinski, and the result was not what Mrs. Purdy predicted.
"If ever I ketch you up to sech fool tricks again," scolded Mrs. Snawdor, who had been called to the rescue, "I'll skin yer hide off! You've no need to take yer hair down except when I tell you. You kin smooth it up jus' like you always done."
Having thus failed in her efforts at personal adornment, Nance turned her attention to beautifying her surroundings. The many new features observed in the homely, commonplace house in Butternut Lane stirred her ambition. Her own room, to be sure, possessed architectural defects that would have discouraged most interior decorators. It was small and dark, with only one narrow opening into an air-shaft. Where the plaster had fallen off, bare laths were exposed, and in rainy weather a tin tub occupied the center of the floor to catch the drippings from a hole in the roof. For the rest, a slat bed, an iron wash-stand, and a three-legged chair comprised the furniture.
But Nance was not in the least daunted by the prospect. With considerable ingenuity she evolved a dresser from a soap box and the colored supplements of the Sunday papers, which she gathered into a valance, in imitation of Mrs. Purdy's bright chintz. In the air-shaft window she started three potato vines in bottles, but not satisfied with the feeble results, she pinned red paper roses to the sickly white stems. The nearest substitutes she could find for pictures were labels off tomato cans, and these she tacked up with satisfaction, remembering Mrs. Purdy's admired fruit pictures.