"What are you going to do with me now?" said she.
"I'm going to take you for a walk. We can't stay here."
"Can you wait?"
"I have waited."
She ran away and stayed away for what seemed an interminable time. Then somebody opened the door and handed Rose in. Somebody kissed her where she stood in the doorway, and laughed softly, and shut the door upon Rose and Tanqueray.
Rose stood there still. "Do you know me?" said she, and laughed.
Somebody had transformed her, had made her slip her stiff white gown and dressed her in a muslin one with a belt that clipped her, showing her pretty waist. Somebody had taught her how to wear a scarf about her shoulders; and somebody had taken off that odious linen collar and bared the white column of her neck.
"She made me put it on," said Rose. "She said if I didn't, I couldn't wear the hat."
Somebody, Rose's mistress, had been in Rose's secret. She knew and understood his great poem of the Hat.
Rose took it out of the band-box and put it on. Impossible to say whether he liked her better with it or without it. He thought without; for she had parted her hair in the middle and braided it at the back.