"What are you laughing at?" her aunt asked. "It is one of the few rather irritating little tricks you still have, that habit of smiling to yourself suddenly when I am talking to you. Some people might think you were laughing at me."
"Oh no, Aunt May," Jasmine protested.
"No, of course I know you are not laughing at me," her aunt allowed. "But I think it's a habit you should try to cure yourself of. It's apt to make you seem a little vapid sometimes."
"Yes, I often feel rather vapid," Jasmine admitted.
"Then all the more reason why you should not let other people notice it," said her aunt; and Jasmine did not argue the point further.
The loss of the ten pounds meant that Jasmine would not be able to have a new evening frock that winter. She was not yet sufficiently dulled by Harley Street not to feel disappointed at this. It has to be a very beautiful evening frock which does not look dowdy after being worn twice a week throughout the year, and the better of Jasmine's two evening frocks was nothing more than pretty and simple on the evening she put it on for the first time.
"Another long miserable year," she thought. "Nothing new till the twenty-fifth of March. All this quarter's allowance has gone in Christmas presents."
Jasmine's most conspicuous present that year was a sunshade that Aunt May had bought at the July sales.
"As if one wanted a sunshade in England," Jasmine said to herself.