With the word a soft beauty ran flickering, an edge of light about the form searched by her gazing eyes. Their shared past flowed in the room ... the skirt was a shabby thin blue serge, rubbed shiny, the skimpy cotton blouse had an ugly greyish stripe and badly cut shoulders, one and eleven at an awful shop, but she was just going to speak.
“There that’s better,” she said lowering her hands to tweak at the blouse, her blue eyes set judiciously on the face of the important Duchesse mirror, her passing servant. “’Ow are you, dear?”
“I’m all right;” thrilled Miriam, “you’re just in time for dinner.”
“I am afraid I don’t look very dinnery,” frowned Miss Dear, fingering the loose unshapely collar of her blouse. “I wonder if you could let me have a tie, just for to-day, dear.”
“I’ve got a lace one, but it’s crumply,” hazarded Miriam.
“I can manage it I daresay if you’d let me avit.”
The gong sounded. “I shan’t be a second,” Miriam promised and fled. The little stair-flight and her landing, the sunset gilded spaces of her room flung her song out into the world. The tie was worse than she had thought, its middle length crushed and grubby. She hesitated over a card of small pearl-headed lace pins, newly bought and forgotten. For fourpence three farthings the twelve smooth filmy pearl heads, their bright sharp-pointed gilt shanks pinned in a perfect even row through the neat oblong of the sheeny glazed card, lit up her drawer, bringing back the lace-hung aisles of the west-end shop, its counters spread with the fascinating details of the worldly life. The pins were the forefront of her armoury, still too blissfully new to be used.... However Eleanor arranged the tie she could not use more than three.
“Thank you dear,” she said indifferently, as if they were her own things obligingly brought in, and swiftly pinned one end of the unexamined tie to her blouse collar. With lifted chin she deftly bound the lace round and round close to her neck each swathe firmly pinned, making a column wider than the width of the lace. Above her blouse, transformed by the disappearance of its ugly collar, her graceful neck went up, a column of filmy lace. Miriam watched, learning and amazed.
“That’s better than nothing anyhow,” said Miss Dear from her sideways movements of contemplation. Three or four small pearly heads gleamed mistily from the shapely column of lace. The glazed card lay on the dressing-table crumpled and rent and empty of all its pins.