The roof garden party was not begun as the social affair it turned out to be. In the beginning it was a business proposition. The party was an outgrowth of a “Be Beautiful” campaign Mimi herself started.  
If Mimi had known the series of exciting events which hinged on the innocent purchase of a bottle of mange cure, she might never have bought it. She might have let dandruff stay in her hair and continue to splotch the bridge of her nose.
 
What to wear at the growing-closer-every-day Commencement affairs turned Mimi’s thoughts from her term themes, two highly important letters from Daddy and Mother Dear, and a reprimand from Mrs. Cole for disturbing study hall.
 
“I can’t wear white for Commencement and look decent with freckles. I don’t look nice in white.”
 
“Who cares?” Sue teased. “To hear you , one would think you were going to graduate, or something.”
 
“Well, I am going to improve my looks. Miss Bassett was talking to us today about our hair and nails. She said my had improved this year. Beginning tonight, I am going to brush my hair one hundred strokes every night before I retire.”
 
“Yeh, I did that once myself—once was about all.”
 
“Dog mange cure is grand for your scalp,” Madge volunteered as the discussion became general.
 
“Is it?” Mimi asked turning to Madge. She had never given much thought to her personal appearance other than cleanliness. She was always too busy doing something. The silliest thing she ever watched was a girl near the highest window, mirror in one hand, in the other, plucking her . She didn’t plan to go in for that sort of beauty; something, say, which would improve her hair—Mother Dear hadn’t made any suggestions about it in so long. It was getting more unruly. She’d tried changing the part from the right side to the left and that had only made it worse. She was thinking of letting it grow long enough to braid so that she could wear it like Dit’s, but the thoughts of shedding and never finding a hat big enough kept her from it.
 
“What does it do to your hair, Madge?”
 
“Oh, makes it shiny and and thick and long. I saw a picture on a box of a woman whose hair fell from her shoulders to her knees. I had a cousin who put mange cure on her hair and——”
 
“Stop!” Sue cried. “Waste no more words. You’ve already sold her the idea. I can tell by the smooth and oily waves”—she made motions with her hands and arms a favorite gesture of Mimi’s—“that the of mange cure will soon the hithertofore air of Tumble Inn. I wouldn’t put that awful smelling stuff on my hair for—for——”
 
She gave up trying to find a word bad enough to describe it.
 
“But you only leave it on one night. Besides it washes off, and furthermore, I don’t mind the odor. It’s a good clean smell like .”
 
“Rave on,” Sue encouraged disdainfully. “Pretty soon you’ll have it sweet as dew hung jasmine in the dawn. Blah! You’ll have Mimi believing she can pose for the pictures in the hair ads after two trial bottles. Double blah!”
 
Two weeks passed before Mimi had an opportunity to buy the dog mange cure.
 
With Commencement so near, every afternoon now some teacher chaperoned a group of shoppers to town. Mimi joined the first group. In order to make her purchase before the others were ready to leave, she left a few sups in the bottom of her chocolate malted milk glass. Anyhow she never could get every drop without making that vulgar zooping, sucking sound on account of the whipped cream settling to the bottom. She didn’t want to “strike bottom” before a chaperon. She had done well to the cherry on two straws safely to her mouth.
 
The chaperon watched her closely while she was at the counter. Sometimes girls slipped notes to the skeets. You can save your eyesight on me, Mimi thought. faced upstarts. She had no note or no time for them. Some girls were so silly!
 
Even after the bottle was stowed away on the top shelf of the bathroom, school was nearly over for the year before Mimi, Madge and several others, who had been begged into the “Beauty School,” found time to put it on when they were sure they would have time to shampoo it out the following morning. In the intervening time, however, Mimi had been using cream and brushing her hair religiously, a hundred strokes a night.
 
“If we don’t put it on tonight, there’s no use,” Mimi urged. She had cornered several of the girls after supper before they left the dining hall. The final rush was on and rounding them up had been difficult. “This is Friday—Sunday is Baccalaureate—Monday—too late.”
 
“Tonight suits me,” Madge said. “I was planning to get up early anyhow.”
 
“Me, too.” Jill agreed.
 
All together there were six who came to Tumble Inn for the scalp beauty treatment. Madge was more or less in charge because she had known people who had done this. However, Mimi had read the directions carefully and had to get in a few words. She could no more stay in the background than a peacock. Center stage-front, was where she belonged and, no matter where she began, she usually wound up there.
 
“Why pick on Tumble Inn, Mimi, when you are the only one who is sap enough to smell like a polecat?”
 
“I didn’t think of that, Sue. I’m sorry. Just seems like that most things that happen, take place here.”
 
............