With as little show of alteration as I could manage, I unripped the gathers, and taking a corner of the stuff I wrapped it round my form in the way I wanted, and stuck in a hat-pin to secure the last bit. “There,” I said triumphantly, “that is the way I want it to go.”
Miss McGregor observed me with patient scepticism.
“I don’t quite see how I am to arrange that,” she remarked.
“You must not arrange it on any account,” I said. “It is to stay just like that.”
“But how are you going to get out of it?”
“Like this,” I replied, slipping the whole thing off my shoulders like a skin. “How I get back again next time is your concern; you are a dressmaker. Dresses like these are worn every day in Paris.”
“Well, I don’t understand how they do it,” replied the forbearing creature.
“You remind me,” I told her, “of a plumber we had here last spring. Mr. Molyneux gave him an order, and the man asked how he was to do it. ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Molyneux said, ‘I am not a plumber.’ The silly man replied: ‘Well, I am a plumber and I don’t know.’ Now please don’t be like the plumber; we had quite enough of that sort of thing with him.”
Miss McGregor poised herself upon one leg, cocked her head on one side, and said it wasn’t the way of the stuff.
I know her ways by this time, so I said I was going out to tea.