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They went, then, to the first night of Mr. Gillespie’s new play. Sally was astonished when Laura, and the maid, and the head lady from Paquille’s and her two assistants, had finished with her and bade her look at herself in the glass.
‘That me?’ she asked, her lips parting and her eyes widening, for it might have been a real grand lady. And she added doubtfully, ‘I ain’t ’alf bare.’
Laura, however, was just as bare, and there was ever so much more of her to be bare with, so she supposed it must be all right; but she did wonder what her father would say if he could see her now—‘Oh, my goodness,’ shuddered Sally, her mind slinking away from the thought.
They had dressed her in a cloud of blue tulle over a cloud of green tulle. Her loveliness was startling. It was like nothing either Laura or the lady from Paquille’s had ever seen, and they had seen most of what there was of existing beauty. Even the maid, an expert in repression, showed excitement. And presently when the Paquille lady wrapped the cloak round her that went with that frock, and, swathed in its green and silver, she looked like a white flower in a slender sheath of green, Laura fairly danced with delight to think what Terry would say, who was used to being so much prettier than anybody else, and what Charles would say, who long had declared there was no such thing as real beauty, and Streatley, who said the women nowadays couldn’t hold a candle to the women of his youth, and everybody.
Such a find, such a haul, such a piece of luck had never yet befallen Laura. And the mischievous pleasure she took in thinking of the effect it was going to have on her relations and of the upsetting results it was going to produce, was all the more surprising because, at the bottom of her heart, she was devoted to them.