“Quite sure, Nancy!” looking back
into my eager eyes with confident affection.
“And you will come back very soon? very?”
“When you quarrel,” she answers, her face
dimpling into a laugh, “I will come and make
it up between you.”
“You must come before then” say
I, with a proud smile, “or your visit is likely
to be indefinitely postponed.”
Roger and I quarrel! We both find the idea so
amusing that we laugh in concert.
“Gertrude. Is my knight come?
O the Lord, my hand! Sister, do my cheeks look
well? Give me a little box o’ the ear, that
I may seem to blush.”—EASTWARD HOE.
She is gone now. The atmosphere of the house
seems less clear, less pure, now that she has left
it. As she drives away, it seems to me, looking
after her, that no flower ever had a modester face,
a more delicate bloom. If I had time to think
about it, I should fret sorely after her, I should
grievously miss her; but I have none.
The carriage that takes her to the station is to wait
half an hour, and then bring back Roger. There
is, therefore, not more than enough time for me to
make the careful and lengthy toilet, on which I have
expended so much painstaking thought. I have
deferred making it till now, so that I may appear
in perfect dainty freshness, as if I had just emerged
from the manifold silver papers of a bandbox, before
him when he arrives— that not a hair of
my flax head may be displaced from its silky sweep;
that there may be no risk of Vick jumping up, and defiling
me with muddy paws that know no respect of clothes.
I take a long time over it. I snub my maid more
than I ever did in my life before. But I am complete
now; to the last pin I am finished. Perhaps—though
this does not strike me till the last moment—perhaps
I am rather, nay, more than rather, overdressed
for the occasion. But surely this, in a person
who has not long been in command of fine clothes,
and even in that short time has had very few opportunities
of airing them, is pardonable.
You remember that it is February. Well, then,
this is the warm splendor in which I am clad.
Genoa velvet, of the color of a dark sapphire, trimmed
with silver-fox fur; and my head crowned with a mob-cap,
concerning which I am in doubt, and should be nervously
glad to have the boys here to enlighten me as to whether
it is very becoming or rather ridiculous. The
object of the mob-cap is to approximate my age to
Roger’s, and to assure all such as the velvet
and fur leave in doubt, that I am entitled to take
my stand among the portly ranks of British matrons.
“Algy was right,” say I, soliloquizing
aloud, as I stand before the long cheval glass, with
a back-hair glass in one hand, by whose aid I correct
my errors in the profile, three-quarters or back view;
“mine is not the most hopeless kind of ugliness.
It is certainly modifiable by dress.”
