"My wrinkles!" cried Pamela, sorely wounded. "That is the first time I ever heard of them. To think that my husband should be the first to tell me I am getting an old woman! But I forgot, you are younger than I, and I daresay in your eyes I seem quite old."
"My dear Pamela, be reasonable. Can a woman's forehead at forty be quite as smooth as it was at twenty? However handsome a woman is at that age—and to my mind it is almost the best age for beauty, just as the ripe rich colouring of a peach is lovelier than the poor little pale blossom that preceded it—however attractive a middle-aged woman may be there must be some traces to show that she has lived half her life; and to suppose that pain brûlé brocade, and hand-worked embroidery, can obliterate those, is extreme folly. Dress in rich and dark velvets, and old point-lace that has been twenty years in your possession, and you will be as beautiful and as interesting as a portrait by one of the old Venetian masters. Can Theodore's highest art make you better than that? Remember that excellent advice of old Polonius's,
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy.
It is the fancy that swells your milliner's bill, the newly-invented trimmings, the complex and laborious combinations."
"I will be dreadfully economical in future, Conrad. For the last year I have dressed to please you."
"But what becomes of all these gowns?" asked the Captain, folding up the bill; "what do you do with them?"
"They go out."
"Out where? To the colonies?"
"No, dear; they go out of fashion; and I give them to Pauline."
"A sixty-guinea dress flung to your waiting-maid! The Duchess of Dovedale could not do things in better style."