Gita laid the gown across her arms and looked at it reverently. She knew the value of old lace, for her mother had possessed several fine pieces before they went to pay a gambling-debt, and part of her education had been in museums where there was always a room devoted to thread filigree; particularly beloved of Millicent. In Bruges and Brussels she had often seen the nuns at work. But although she had found several pieces of Irish and Honiton in a chest in her grandmother’s room, she had hardly glanced at them. Real lace didn’t match short skirts and bobbed hair.
But this mass of point d’Alençon was quite another matter, and she experienced the same sensation as when she had gazed first upon the soft sheen of her pearls.
“I shall be married in this,” she announced. “I’d intended to wear any old thing I happened to have on. But this——Oh, yes! And just as it is. The waist will have to be let out for I couldn’t stand a corset five minutes.”
“Gita!” Elsie, who was sitting back on her heels, suddenly sprang to her feet and clapped her hands. “It’s my turn to have an inspiration. Why don’t you marry Eustace on Christmas Eve—spring a surprise at the end of the party?”
Polly, who after months of intimacy with Gita sometimes felt as young as her years, fairly danced. “Gorgeous! It will be the night of our lives. I can see you stepping down those stairs with a powdered footman on either side——”
“Haven’t any footmen——”
“We’ll hire them—no, make two of the men dress up.”
“I can’t have a wedding like that without your mother and Mr. Donald.” Gita, surrounded by these ancestral feminine relics, was feeling every inch a Carteret.
“They’ll be told to arrive with Dr. Lancaster on the stroke of midnight—no, ten minutes before. Leave it to me.”
“But suppose Eustace—he’s the sort that hates to be rushed—I should think.”