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“It’s perfectly horrid to be so poor,” grumbled Penelope. Penelope did not often grumble, but just now, as she sat tapping with one pink-tipped finger her invitation to Blanche Anderson’s party, she felt that grumbling was the only relief she had.

Penelope was seventeen, and when one is seventeen and cannot go to a party because one hasn’t a suitable dress to wear, the world is very apt to seem a howling wilderness.

“I wish I could think of some way to get you a new waist,” said Doris, with what these sisters called “the poverty pucker” coming in the centre of her pretty forehead. “If your black skirt were sponged and pressed and re-hung, it would do very well.”

Penelope saw the poverty pucker and immediately repented with all her impetuous heart having grumbled. That pucker came often enough without being brought there by extra worries.

“Well, there is no use sitting here sighing for the unattainable,” she said, jumping up briskly. “I’d better be putting my grey matter into that algebra instead of wasting it plotting for a party dress that I certainly can’t get. It’s a sad thing for a body to lack brains when she wants to be a teacher, isn’t it? If I could only absorb algebra and history as I can music, what a blessing it would be! Come now, Dorrie dear, smooth that pucker out. Next year I shall be earning a princely salary, which we can squander on party gowns at will–if people haven’t given up inviting us by that time, in sheer despair of ever being able to conquer our exclusiveness.”

Penelope went off to her detested algebra with a laugh, but the pucker did not go out of Doris’ forehead. She wanted Penelope to go to that party.

Penelope has studied so hard all winter and she hasn’t gone anywhere, thought the older sister wistfully. She is getting discouraged over those examinations and she needs just a good, jolly time to hearten her up. If it could only be managed!

But Doris did not see how it could. It took every cent of her small salary as typewriter in an uptown office to run their tiny establishment and keep Penelope in school dresses and books. Indeed, she could not have done even that much if they had not owned their little cottage. Next year it would be easier if Penelope got through her examinations successfully, but just now there was absolutely not a spare penny.

“It is hard to be poor. We are a pair of misfits,” said Doris, with a patient little smile, thinking of Penelope’s uncultivated talent for music and her own housewifely gifts, which had small chance of flowering out in her business life.

Doris dreamed of pretty dresses all that night and thought about them all the next day. So, it must be confessed, did Penelope, though she would not have admitted it for the world.

When Doris reached home the next evening, she found Penelope hovering over a bulky parcel on the sitting-room table.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said with an exaggerated gasp of relief. “I really don’t think my curiosity could have borne the strain for another five minutes. The expressman brought this parcel an hour ago, and there’s a letter for you from Aunt Adella on the clock shelf, and I think they belong to each other. Hurry up and find out. Dorrie, darling, what if it should be a–a–present of some sort or other!”

“I suppose it can’t be anything else,” smiled Doris. She knew that Penelope had started out to say “a new dress.” She cut the strings and removed the wrappings. Both girls stared.

“Is it–it isn’t–yes, it is! Doris Hunter, I believe it’s an old quilt!”

Doris unfolded the odd present with a queer feeling of disappointment. She did not know just what she had expected the package to contain, but certainly not this. She laughed a little shakily.