"I should say so, Belle; I do think that you have had some of the ugliest clothes, lately, that I have seen this winter," interrupted Nora, rather unceremoniously. Belle reddened very deeply at this speech, for as a matter of fact she was extremely sensitive on the subject of her clothes. Unlike Brenda or Edith, she never had the privilege of going to a fine costumer; nor could she even employ the dressmaker who made some of the gowns worn by others of her set of friends. The circumstances in her family were such that she could not gratify her taste in dress. She must wear this thing or that thing that her grandmother had selected, or must have something of her mother's altered to the present fashion for girls. However skilful the alterations, she felt as if she were in some way disgraced. Now to tell the truth Belle herself had so much natural taste that only a very severe critic could see anything to criticise in her dress, and a sensible person watching the two girls would have said that it was much better for a young girl to be brought up with the somewhat economical habits that had to be Belle's than to have the rather too elegant clothes, and the many changes of costume which Mrs. Blair seemed to prefer for Edith. But girls will be girls, and Belle's great grievance was that when fawn brown for example, was the fashionable spring shade, she had to wear a gown of stone grey, because somewhere in the cedar chests in her grandmother's attic there was a stone grey thibet, ample enough to cut over into a spring gown for her. As to hats, neither her mother nor her grandmother approved of her having her hats trimmed at a milliner's. In consequence, after her mother had put on a hat a simple trimming such as she approved herself, Belle would spend her first spare afternoon in ripping it all off, in order to retrim it. Indeed she usually spent not one afternoon but several in this operation, and even ventured to lay out her own pocket money in little ornaments or in ribbons that she thought would add to the appearance of the hat. In the same way she was able too to make slight alterations in the appearance of her gowns, and sometimes the changes were improvements. At other times what she had considered a genuine addition to the style of her garment or hat to other eyes seemed only queer, or in schoolgirl parlance "weird."