“It’s very lovely, but if you’d like another for a change I’ve got a great many pieces,” Pinnie remarked with a generosity which made the young man feel she was acquitting herself finely.
Rose Muniment laid her little hand on the dressmaker’s arm and responded straight: “No, not a change, not a change. How can there be a change when there’s already everything? There’s everything here—every colour that was ever seen or invented or dreamed of since the world began.” And with her other hand she stroked affectionately her variegated quilt. “You’ve a great many pieces, but you haven’t as many as there are here; and the more you should patch them together the more the whole thing would resemble this dear dazzling old friend. I’ve another idea, very very charming, and perhaps her ladyship can guess what it is.” Rosy kept her fingers on Pinnie’s arm and, smiling, turned her brilliant eyes from one of her female companions to the other as to associate and blend them as closely as possible in their interest in her. “In connexion with what we were talking about a few minutes ago—couldn’t your ladyship just go a little further in the same line?” Then as Lady Aurora looked troubled and embarrassed, blushing at being called upon to answer a conundrum, as it were, so publicly, her infirm friend came to her assistance. “It will surprise you at first, but it won’t when I’ve explained it: my idea is just simply a sweet pink dressing-gown!”
“A sweet pink dressing-gown!” Lady Aurora repeated.
“With a neat black trimming! Don’t you see the connexion with what we were talking of before our good visitors came in?”
“That would be very pretty,” said Pinnie. “I’ve made them like that in my time. Or a carefully-selected blue trimmed with white.”
“No, pink and black, pink and black—to suit my complexion. Perhaps you didn’t know I have a complexion; but there are very few things I lack! Anything at all I should fancy, you were so good as to say. Well now, I fancy that! Your ladyship does see the connexion by this time, doesn’t she?”
Lady Aurora looked distressed, as if she felt she certainly ought to see it but was not sure that even yet it didn’t escape her, and as if at the same time she were struck with the fact that this sudden evocation might result in a strain on the small dressmaker’s resources. “A pink dressing-gown would certainly be very becoming and Miss Pynsent would be very kind,” she said; while Hyacinth made the mental comment that it was a largeish order, since Pinnie would have obviously to furnish the materials as well as the labour. The amiable coolness with which the invalid laid her under contribution was, however, to his sense, quite in character, and he reflected that after all when you were flat on your back like that you had the right to reach out your hands (it wasn’t far you could reach at best) and grab what you could get. Pinnie declared she knew just the article Miss Muniment wanted and that she would undertake to make a perfect duck of it; and Rosy went on to say that she must explain of what use such an article would be, but for this purpose there must be another guess. She would give it to Miss Pynsent and Hyacinth—as many times as they liked: what had she and Lady Aurora been talking about before they came in? She clasped her hands and her eyes shone with her eagerness while she continued to turn them from Lady Aurora to the dressmaker. What would they imagine? What would they think natural, delightful, magnificent—if one could only end at last by making out the right place to put it? Hyacinth suggested successively a cage of Java sparrows, a music-box and a shower-bath—or perhaps even a full-length portrait of her ladyship; and Pinnie looked at him askance in a frightened way, as if perchance he were joking too broadly. Rosy at last relieved their suspense and announced: “A sofa, just a sofa now! What do you say to that? Do you suppose that idea could have come from any one but her ladyship? She must have all the credit of it; she came out with it in the course of conversation. I believe we were talking of the peculiar feeling that comes just under the shoulder-blades if one never has a change. She mentioned it as she might have mentioned just the right sort of rub—there are such wrong sorts!—or another spoonful of that American stuff. We’re thinking it over and one of these days, if we give plenty of time to the question, we shall find the place, the very nicest and snuggest of all and no other. I hope you see the connexion with the pink dressing-gown,” she pursued to Pinnie, “and I hope you see the importance of the question, ‘Shall anything go?’ I should like you to look round a bit and tell me what you would answer if I were to say to you, ‘Can anything go?’”
XV
“I’m sure there’s nothing I should like to part with,” Pinnie returned; and while she surveyed the scene Lady Aurora, with discretion, to lighten Amanda’s responsibility, got up and turned to the window, which was open to the summer evening and admitted still the last rays of the long day. Hyacinth, after a moment, placed himself beside her, looking out with her at the dusky multitude of chimney-pots and the small black houses roofed with grimy tiles. The thick warm air of a London July floated beneath them, suffused with the everlasting uproar of the town, which appeared to have sunk into quietness but again became a mighty voice as soon as one listened for it; here and there, in poor windows, glimmered a turbid light, and high above, in a clearer smokeless zone, a sky still fair and luminous, a faint silver star looked down. The sky was the same that bent far away in the country over golden fields and purple hills and gardens where nightingales sang; but from this point of view everything that covered the earth was ugly and sordid and seemed to express or to represent the weariness of toil. Presently, to Hyacinth’s astonishment, Lady Aurora said to him: “You never came after to get the books.”
“Those you kindly offered to lend me? I didn’t know it was an understanding.”