Finally Suzanna found her voice. "They're very nice, daddy," she said.
"Yes, they are very nice," he said. "See, you can turn them up. They're as soft as a kid glove."
"Well, since you've bought the shoes," said Mrs. Procter, "and probably at a very reasonable figure--" she paused, and Mr. Procter finished:
"Yes, they were only forty-eight cents, a remarkable bargain, I think."
"Remarkable," said Mrs. Procter, picking them up. "Why, I believe they're a handmade shoe! Well," she went on, "since the shoes are accounted for, I think if I have to I can quite easily manage the rest of the outfit."
Suzanna's heart sank lower. She only wondered miserably if her mother, seeing a piece of inexpensive goods of almost any shade, and finding a pattern easy to manage, would make up what she thought would do quite well for the Indian Drill costume. Then her thoughts returned to the shoes. Perhaps after all they wouldn't fit! She was enabled by that emancipating thought to turn a happier face to her father and again to thank him.
"I think," said Suzanna desperately, "that perhaps they're a little bit too small--narrow, I mean."
Suzanna had to confess that they didn't hurt.
"They certainly make your foot look very nice and slender," said her father.
Well, Suzanna thought miserably, she should have to wear them, and in that belief all interest in the Indian Drill left her. She simply couldn't, she felt, take her lead on the eventful day wearing those shoes. Every eye in the audience, she knew, would be fixed upon them, so different from those of the other girls, so terribly old-fashioned, as instinctively she sensed them to be.
Mrs. Procter carefully wrapped the bargains in the original tissue paper. She was happy in the thought that her little daughter was provided with a pretty and appropriate pair of dancing shoes.
But it was very perfunctorily that Suzanna went through the ensuing rehearsals at school. Her spirits were not lifted even when Miss Smithson announced that the costumes were to be obtained through a masquerader at the small cost of twenty-five cents for each pupil. But at length, the child's natural persevering force had its way, and she set her mind to studying the question of how to avoid wearing the unsuitable shoes and still preserve her father's confidence in his own good judgment. Usually she asked no help, working alone on the problems which assailed her, but suddenly the thought of her friend Drusilla came to her. She would ask Drusilla what she thought about the matter.