She darted hither and thither through the wood, noting with a pleasure keener than ever before how soft and sleek the moss was to her feet, how silky the flank of the beech to her leaning cheek, how sweetly sharp the intimate evening note of the birds.
And she was quite unfitted to be the goddess of these rustic beauties, for all her mind could feel in that softness and sleekness and clear calling was their alikeness to artificiality. She felt thin slippers on her feet, rubbed an ecstatic cheek against the sheen of satin, and in her ears echoed no diviner music than the Tol-de-rol Tol-de-rol of the Bugletown band on Flora Day. Save in her sincerity, she was as artificial a goddess as ever graced a Versailles Fête Champêtre. What were leaf and bird to her but the stuff of her life, whereas white satin gleamed with the shimmer of the very heavens!
Hers was not, it is true, the milliner's paradise of Cherry and Primrose, but it was one into which she could only penetrate fitly clad. What wonder then that, brought up without any tutoring in the excellencies of Nature, she should display the sad lack of true feeling so deplored in her later by that nice arbiter of taste, Miss Flora Le Pettit?
CHAPTER V: IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN
Chapter V
IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN
With morning came thoughts of the practical side of the business and, the worst of her daily duties performed, Loveday ascended to her chamber to examine the scanty contents of her small oaken chest. It was a sea-chest, legacy from her roving father, who had given it to her mother, and often enough had Aunt Senath expressed scruples about allowing her to keep a gift obtained so godlessly. Perhaps the fact that it was a good chest and better than anything she could have bought had something to do with Aunt Senath's complaisance in permitting it to remain. Perhaps Loveday's fierce look in defence of it was not without influence also. The chest stayed in the little attic room, and made of it, to Loveday's eyes, a place peculiarly her own, and rich because of its associations. There was something about the chest, its dark polish and coarse carving, that even led her to think hopefully of its poor contents.
She crouched beside it now, upon her heels, and lifting the lid, gazed expectantly at what was revealed.
After all, it did not look so bad, just a level surface of white linen...