“Oh, never,” she assured me. “I have a stand made to exactly my own shape, and they never need to trouble me at all.”
“But can you judge how a thing will look with a great red twill bust and a stump sticking out of it?”
“Oh, perfectly; it only needs a little imagination.”
When she had gone, I went to Miss McGregor. “Look here,” I said, “you slip the things on the housemaid and pretend she is me. It only needs a little imagination.”
Miss McGregor was sitting in a shower of bits. She took no notice of my suggestion.
“I have got on as best I could,” she said, dispersing her last mouthful of pins all over her tiny chest. I was feeling a good deal better, and said I would slip on the garment. The picture she was to copy showed a slim and graceful creature with a long piece of soft material wound simply under one shoulder and over the other, caught in at the waist with a buckle, and falling in folds across the side of a very clinging underskirt. What I saw in the glass was a rain-water tub (surmounted by my head) covered with a closely gathered frill which was neatly sewn along the edge of the lid. The lid itself had some folds of the material arranged with geometrical precision round the place where the head came out.
My breath forsook me.
“Dear Miss McGregor,” I murmured, “you have not snipped all the stuff into small bits, have you? If you look at the picture you will see it is made all in one. Just folded round quite simply, beginning from one corner—so——”
“I couldn’t quite understand how you would get it on and off the other way, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, after a minute’s thoughtful silence, “and the effect is just the same. I have arranged the folds so that they hide the join.”
I stood entranced by my reflection; I even began to take a morbid interest in it, as I saw how we depend for our personal attraction on clothes; it opened such a world of speculation amongst my friends. The knowledge was comforting to this extent: that there is more hope in a petition to one’s dressmaker to take back the dress she gave and change it than there would be in a request to one’s parents for a different face.