"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown. The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it had survived so long. She had seized on it with her unerring tact: this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen: and she and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day. Laura had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or Yvonne's effect of the arresting and bizarre. "Isn't she almost too slight for it?" Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had hummed a little French song—
'Mignonne allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil
A point perdu ceste vespree
I as plis de sa robe pourpree
Et son teint au votre pareil . . .'
She discerned in Isabel that quality of beauty, noble, spirited, and yet wistful, which requires a most expensive setting of simplicity. And that was why Isabel opened her coat. If Captain Hyde had admired her in her Chilmark muslin, what would he think of flounce and fold of rose-point of Alencon under Yvonne's perfumed furs? And then she blushed again because the yearning in his eyes made her wonder if he cared after all whether she wore lace or cotton. Everything was so strange!
Strangest of all it was, to the brink of unreality, that Laura evidently remained blind. But Laura was always blind. "Why, she never even sees Val!" reflected Isabel scornfully. And yet— suppose Isabel were deceiving herself? What if Captain Hyde were not in earnest? But her older self comforted her child's self: careless was he, and composed? "You were not always so composed, Lawrence," in her own mind the elder Isabel mocked him with her sparkling eyes.
Waterloo, lamplit and resonant: the pulsing of many lamps, the hurry of many steps, the flitting by of many faces under an arch of gloom: dark quiet and the scent of violets in a waiting car.
"What a jolly taxi!" Isabel exclaimed. "I never was in a taxi like this before. Is it a more expensive kind?"
"My dear Lawrence, you certainly have the art of making your life run on wheels!" said Laura smiling. "How many telegrams have you sent today?"
"If you do a thing at all you may as well do it in decent comfort," Lawrence replied sententiously. "Half past seven; that'll give us easy time! I booked a table at Malvani's, I thought you would prefer it to one of the big crowded shows."
"Are we going to have supper—dinner I mean—at a restaurant?" asked Isabel awestruck.
Laurance smiled at her with irrepressible tenderness. "Did you think you weren't going to get anything to eat at all?" He forbore to remind her of her unfortunate allusion to sandwiches— for which Isabel was grateful to him. "Aren't you hungry?"