So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her. Shining like a cascade of brown waters, it reached below her knee. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the old red carpet.
She put on her old brown jacket and her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she ran out of the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: ‘Mme Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.’ One Eight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting.
“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.
“I buy hair,” said Madame, large, too white, chilly. “Take your hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”
Down rippled the brown cascade.
“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.
“Give it to me quick,” said Della.
The next two hours she was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores. It was a platinum fob chain[3] simple in design. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value – the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 78 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Although the watch was grand, he sometimes looked at it on the sly[4] because of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason.[5] She got out her curling irons[6] and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy.[7] She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl.[8] But what could I do – oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.