He had been so absorbed in the game that for a moment he did not notice his self-betrayal, nor the shout of laughter which followed; but now he stood there in all the conscious shame of his girl’s dress. He blushed up to the roots of his hair, and pushed his way confusedly out of the room, forgetting even to take with him what he had won on the last roll.
Sophia tried to look grave and unconscious, but in a few seconds the corners of her mouth broke down, and she leaned back in her chair with peal after peal of laughter.
‘Oh, I could never have invented so divinely apt a punishment!’ she cried. ‘Leonard detected in a girl’s dress, and before all the people! Indeed, that is an instance of the fierce light that beats upon a throne. Oh, how furious he will be! I wonder where he got his costume. His hat—oh, my dear Blanche! his hat! It was like Covent Garden on a summer’s morning—a cargo of flowers and nameless vegetables. Oh, I cannot stop; I must go and rub the lesson in. He has a horror of making himself ridiculous. Perhaps this will cure him for awhile.’
Sophia went straight back to the Palace, where the servants were all agape to see her return so early, and to Leonard’s room. He had got there only a moment before her, since she had taken the short-cut through the private door in the Palace garden, and he was tearing the detected finery from him. On his bed lay the hat, a perfect garden of magenta roses and sage-green ribbons, and he was even then wrestling with the hooks and eyes of the bodice. The boy stamped his foot angrily when he saw her, and his cheeks were redder than the roses in his hat and infinitely more healthy in tone.
‘Why did you make a fool of me, mother,’ he cried, ‘before all those people? I shall never be able to go to the Casino again. It was brutal of you, and I was enjoying myself so much.’
Sophia burst out laughing.
‘Dear Lennie, what a lovely hat!’ she cried. ‘Where did you get it? I shall order one like it, and we will go driving together in them. Do you propose to wear that dress always instead of your sailor clothes? It is not very well cut. As for my making a fool of you, I think you are more to blame than I. How could you do such a thing!’
‘It was your fault,’ cried he. ‘I had forgotten everything in the game. Oh, these strings! I think the devil made them.’
‘And a fool tied them,’ said Sophia. ‘Here, let me do them for you. I thought the dress did not fit very well, and no wonder, if you had your shirt on under the bodice and your trousers under the skirt. And where are your stays? It is all your fault, Leonard; I told you not to go to the club.’
‘I hope you didn’t think I was going to obey you?’ said Leonard, with singular contempt.