Men do business well, but when women enter the field they are geniuses at money extracting.  I felt myself already clothed perfectly when that girl said my figure “commanded” a proper dress.  Of course, Klein pays Madame Courtier a commission for the customers she passes on to him.  The one for me must have looked to her like a big transaction.

I spent three days at the great Klein establishment, only going to the hotel to sleep, and most of the time I forgot to eat.  Madame Rene must have been Madame Courtier’s twin sister in youth, and Madame Telliers in the hat department was the triplet to them both.  When women have genius it breaks out all over them like measles, and they never recover from it; those women had the confluent kind.  But I know that Madame Rene really approved of me, for when I blushed and asked her if she could recommend a good beauty doctor she held up her hands and shuddered.

“Never, madame, never pour vous.  Ravissant, charmant—­it is too foolish.  Nevair! Jamais, jamais de la vie!” I had to calm her down, and she bowed over my hand when we parted.

I thought Klein was going to do the same thing or worse when I signed the cheque which would be enough to provide him with a new motor-car, but he didn’t.  He only said politely, “And I am delighted that the trousseau is perfectly satisfactory to you, madame.”

That was an awful shock, and I hope I didn’t show it as I murmured “Perfectly, thank you.”

The word “trousseau” can be spoken in a woman’s presence for many years with no effect, but it is an awful shock when she first really hears it.  I felt queer all the afternoon as I packed those trunks for the five o’clock train.

Yes, the word “trousseau” ought to have a definite surname after it always, and that’s why my loyalty dragged poor Mr. Carter out into the light of my conscience.  The thinking of him had a strange effect on me.  I had laid out the dream in dark grey-blue cloth, tailored almost beyond endurance, to wear in the train going home, and had thrown the old black silk bag across the chair to give to the hotel maid, but the decision of the session between conscience and loyalty made me pack the precious blue wonder and put on once more the black rags of remembrance in a kind of panic of respect.

I would lots rather have bought poor Mr. Carter the monument I have been planning for months (to keep up conversation with Aunt Adeline) than wear that dress again.  I felt conscience reprove me once more with loyalty looking on in disapproval as I buttoned the old thing up for the last time, because I really ought to have stayed a day longer to buy that monument, but—­to tell the truth I wanted to see Billy so desperately that his “sleep-place” above my heart hurt as if it might have prickly heat break out at any minute.

So I hurried and stuffed the grey-blue darling in the top tray, lapped the old black silk around my waist and belted it in with a black belt off a new green linen I had bought for morning walks—­down to the butcher’s in the High Street, I suppose.  That is about the only morning dissipation in Hillsboro that I can think of, and it all depends on whom you meet, how much of a dissipation it is.