“Yes. I stayed there. What a beautiful old place it is. Have you been there lately?”
“No. Not for two or three years now. I was very gay the last time I was there. I think I went to a dance every night. My poor brothers were alive then. We used to drive off together. I’ve never been there since.”
“Ah,” said Perrin. He paused for a moment, so that his brain might make the picture of the woman before him sitting in the gloom of the carriage, with all her delicate beauty warmly wrapped by the two young men now dead. “Furs,” he muttered to himself. “Furs, and the lamps shining on the snow.” Then he looked at Olivia, noting the grey and black dress, the one gold bracelet round her wrist, and the old pearl ear-rings against the mass of hair.
“What jolly clothes women wear,” he said, meaning (like most men who use such phrases) “How beautiful you look there.”
“This?” she asked. “This is my oldest frock.”
“Is it? I didn’t remember it. How do you get your clothes?”
“I tell my dressmaker.”
“I wish you’d let me design you a dress.”
“I should be very pleased. What sort of dress would you design for me?”
“I would have you in a sort of white satin bodice, all embroidered with tiny scarlet roses. And then a little black velvet coat over it, with very full sleeves, slashed, to show an inner sleeve of dark blue silk. And the lining of the velvet would be dark green; so you would have green, blue, white, and red all contrasted against the black of the velvet.”