N.B.—­I must get over apologizing to myself when I buy respectable clothes.  It savours too much of Aunt Lot’s old habit of saying, every time she bought a best gown, and I remonstrated with her for the colour (it was always black in those days; since she’s married the Reverend Jabez she’s taken to greens), “When I consider that a black dress would be suitable to be buried in, it seems less like a vain luxury.”

We were admiring the dainty muslins, but only in the “abstract,” when I looked up, conscious that some one was coming directly toward us, and saw Sylvia Latham crossing the shop from the door, her rapid, swinging gait bringing her to us before short-sighted Miss Lavinia had a chance to raise her lorgnette.

Sylvia was genuinely glad to see us, and she expressed it both by look and speech, without the slightest symptom of gush, yet with the confiding manner of one who craves companionship.  I had, in fact, noticed the same thing during our call the afternoon before.

“Well, and what are we buying to-day?” asked Miss Lavinia, clearing her voice by a little caressing sound halfway between a purr and a cluck, and patting the hand that lingered affectionately on hers.

“I really—­don’t—­know,” answered Sylvia, smiling at her own hesitation.  “Mamma says that if I do not get my clothes together before people begin to come back from the South, I shall be nowhere, so she took me with her to Mme. Couteaux’s this morning.  Mamma goes there because she says it saves so much trouble.  Madame keeps a list of every article her customers have, and supplies everything, even down to under linen and hosiery, so she has made for mamma a plan of exactly what she would need for next season, and after having received her permission, will at once begin to carry it out.  Of course the clothes will be very beautiful and harmonious, and mamma has so much on her hands, now that father is away,—­the new cottage at Oaklands is being furnished, and me to initiate in the way I’m supposed to go,—­that it certainly simplifies matters for her.

“Me?  Ah, I do not like the system at all, or Madame Couteaux either, and the feeling is mutual, I assure you.  Without waiting to be asked, even, she looked me over from head to foot and said that my lines are very bad, that I curve in and out at the wrong places, that I must begin at once by wearing higher heels to throw me forward!

“At first I was indignant, and then the ludicrous climbed uppermost, and I laughed, whereat Madame looked positively shocked, and even mamma seemed aghast and murmured something apologetic about my having been at boarding-school in the country, and at college, where I had ridden horseback without proper instruction, which had injured my figure.  Only imagine, Aunt Lavinia, those glorious gallops among the Rockcliffe Hills hurting one’s body in any way!  But then, I suppose body and figure are wholly different things; at any rate, Madame Couteaux gave a shrug, as if shedding all responsibility for my future from her fat shoulders, and so, while mamma is there, I am taking a run out in the cold world of raw material and observing for myself.