ACT Reading Practice Test 33

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from Susan Coolidge’s novel, What Katy Did © 1872.

The September sun was glinting cheerfully into a pretty bedroom furnished with blue. It danced on the glossy hair and bright eyes of two girls, who sat together hemming ruffles for a white muslin dress. The

Line 5 half-finished skirt of the dress lay on the bed, and as each crisp ruffle was completed, the girls added it to the snowy heap, which looked like a drift of transparent clouds or a pile of foamy white of egg beaten stiff enough to stand alone.

10 These girls were Clover and Elsie Carr, and it was Clover’s first evening dress for which they were hemming ruffles. It was nearly two years since a certain visit made by Johnnie to Inches Mills and more than three since Clover and Katy had returned home from

15 the boarding school at Hillsover. Clover was now eighteen. She was a very small Clover still, but it would have been hard to find anywhere a prettier little maiden than she had grown to be. Her skin was so exquisitely fair that her arms and

20 wrists and shoulders, which were round and dimpled like an infant’s, seemed cut out of daisies or white rose leaves. Her thick, brown hair waved and coiled gracefully about her head. Her smile was peculiarly sweet, and the eyes, always Clover’s chief beauty,

25 had still that pathetic look which made them quite irresistible to anyone with a tender or sympathetic heart. Elsie, who adored Clover, considered her as beautiful as girls in books, and was proud to be permitted

30 to hem ruffles for the dress in which she was to burst upon the world. Though, as for that, not much “bursting” was possible in the village of Burnet, where tea parties of a middle-aged description, and now and then a mild little dance, rep-resented “gaiety” and

35 “society.” Girls “came out” very much as the sun comes out in the morning—by slow degrees and gradual approaches, with no particular one moment which could be fixed upon as having been the climax of the joyful event.

40 “There,” said Elsie, adding another ruffle to the pile on the bed, “there’s the fifth done. It’s going to be ever so pretty, I think. I’m glad you had it all white; it’s a great deal nicer.” “Cecy wanted me to have a blue bodice and sash,”

45 said Clover, “but I wouldn’t. Then she tried to persuade me to get a long spray of pink roses for the skirt.” “I’m so glad you didn’t! Cecy was always crazy about pink roses. I only wonder she didn’t wear them when she was married!”

50 Yes, the excellent Cecy, who at thirteen had announced her intention to devote her whole life to teaching Sunday School, visiting the poor, and setting a good example to her more worldly contemporaries, had actually forgotten these fine resolutions, and before

55 she was twenty had become the wife of Sylvester Slack, a young lawyer in a neighboring town! Cecy’s wedding and wedding clothes, and Cecy’s house furnishing, had been the great excitement of the preceding year in Burnet; and a fresh excitement had come since in the
60 shape of Cecy’s baby, now about two months old, and named ‘Katherine Clover,’ after her two friends. This made it natural that Cecy and her affairs should still be of interest in the Carr household, and Johnnie, at the time we write of, was paying her a week’s visit.

65 “She was rather wedded to them,” went on Clover, pursuing the subject of the pink roses. “She was almost vexed when I wouldn’t buy the spray. But it cost lots, and I didn’t want it at all, so I stood firm. Besides, I always said that my first party dress should be plain

70 white. Girls in novels always wear white to their first balls and fresh flowers are a great deal prettier, anyway, than the artificial ones. Katy says she’ll give me some violets to wear.” “Oh, will she? That will be lovely!” cried the ador-

75 ing Elsie. “Violets look just like you, somehow. Oh, Clover, what sort of a dress do you think I shall have when I grow up and go to parties and things? Won’t it be awfully interesting when you and I go out to choose it?” Clover’s smile beamed.