“I will send it to you every morning,” said Willie Woodley.
He found them what Bessie Alden thought excellent places, under the great trees, beside the famous avenue whose humors had been made familiar to the young girl’s childhood by the pictures in Punch. The day was bright and warm, and the crowd of riders and spectators, and the great procession of carriages, were proportionately dense and brilliant. The scene bore the stamp of the London Season at its height, and Bessie Alden found more entertainment in it than she was able to express to her companions. She sat silent, under her parasol, and her imagination, according to its wont, let itself loose into the great changing assemblage of striking and suggestive figures. They stirred up a host of old impressions and preconceptions, and she found herself fitting a history to this person and a theory to that, and making a place for them all in her little private museum of types. But if she said little, her sister on one side and Willie Woodley on the other expressed themselves in lively alternation.
“Look at that green dress with blue flounces,” said Mrs. Westgate. “Quelle toilette!”
“That’s the Marquis of Blackborough,” said the young man—“the one in the white coat. I heard him speak the other night in the House of Lords; it was something about ramrods; he called them ‘wamwods.’ He’s an awful swell.”
“Did you ever see anything like the way they are pinned back?” Mrs. Westgate resumed. “They never know where to stop.”
“They do nothing but stop,” said Willie Woodley. “It prevents them from walking. Here comes a great celebrity—Lady Beatrice Bellevue. She’s awfully fast; see what little steps she takes.”
“Well, my dear,” Mrs. Westgate pursued, “I hope you are getting some ideas for your couturiere?”
“I am getting plenty of ideas,” said Bessie, “but I don’t know that my couturiere would appreciate them.”
Willie Woodley presently perceived a friend on horseback, who drove up beside the barrier of the Row and beckoned to him. He went forward, and the crowd of pedestrians closed about him, so that for some ten minutes he was hidden from sight. At last he reappeared, bringing a gentleman with him—a gentleman whom Bessie at first supposed to be his friend dismounted. But at a second glance she found herself looking at Lord Lambeth, who was shaking hands with her sister.
“I found him over there,” said Willie Woodley, “and I told him you were here.”