She can't believe she's doing this. She keeps looking over her shoulder at her bedroom door, making sure he won't see her "shirking." The young girl who trekked up to the house just wanted to be beautiful. That hardly warranted making a deal, so Belle had brought her in and had led her straight into her chambers to the front of her vanity. Although it had been ages since she'd done anything more than curl her hair, she remembered how to apply just the right amount of makeup and was now brushing the girl's long wheaten hair.
"Are you sure this is all I need?"
"It's all about how you carry yourself, the confidence you have," she says. Placing a hand on the girl's shoulder she adds, "And inner beauty goes a long way."
"No one seems to notice the inner beauty if the outer beauty isn't there," the girl pouts, wincing as Belle works out the last tangle at the tip of her hair.
"Oh, I doubt that. Just keeping your hair out of your face will do wonders for you. Here." She moves over to the wardrobe and pulls out a simple collared dress, a soft robin's egg blue. "You can take this with you."
"It's lovely," the girl coos, brushing the skirt with her fingertips. "And it's so simple!"
"Well, I think that's because whoever made this dress remembered fashion isn't about people noticing your clothes."
"It's not?"
"No. It's about the clothes making people notice you. Your skin is so fair and your eyes are so blue that I think that color will really bring them out." She doesn't do this. She doesn't sit around gazing into a mirror analyzing herself and others, but it is an emergency, after all. And it's not like this is a shallow girl, she thinks. She's just lonely and needs a little confidence.
"Thank you. I, I don't know how I can pay you..."
"No need." The smile she receives makes Belle wonder how this girl could have possibly gotten it into her head that she isn't pretty.
"Thank you!" she breathes, hugging the dress to herself. They head back downstairs towards the door, the slightest application of eye shadow and gloss eliciting a straight back, a strong smile, and a warm demeanor nowhere in sight when the girl had knocked at the door. "Thank you again."
"It's no trouble. Be careful going back." She opens the door for the girl.
"I would never have expected Rumpelstiltskin's wife to be so generous."
"What?" she asks, several seconds after the girl had closed the door and started for home.