"Not by any manner of means did she. My mother would not consider that she was doing her duty to her son by winking at his indolent habits in any such fashion; she believes that it is his sacred duty to eat his breakfast by early candle-light, and if he sins in that direction it is not for her to smooth the punishment of the transgressor."
Louise laughed over the serio-comic tone in which this was said, albeit there was a little feeling of dismay in her heart; these things sounded so new, and strange, and unmotherly!
"Louise dear, I don't want to dictate the least in the world, and I don't want to pretend to know more than I do; but isn't that dress just a trifle too stylish for the country—in the morning, you know?"
This hesitating, doubtful sort of question was put to Mrs. Morgan somewhat later, after a rapid and apparently unpremeditated toilet.
She gave the speaker the benefit of a flash from a pair of roguish eyes as she said—
"Part of that sentence is very opportune, Lewis. You are evidently 'pretending to know more than you do.' This dress was prepared especially for a morning toilet in the country, and cost just fivepence a yard."
"Is it possible!" he answered, surveying her from head to foot with a comic air of bewilderment. "Then, Louise, what is it that you do to your dresses?"
"Wear them," she answered demurely. "And I shall surely wear this this morning; it fits precisely."
Did it? Her husband was in great doubt. He would not have liked to own it; he did not own it even to himself; but the truth was, he lived in a sort of terror of his mother's opinions. She was easily shocked, easily disgusted; the whole subject of dress shocked her, perhaps, more than any other. She was almost eloquent over the extravagance, the lavish display, the waste of time as well as money exhibited in these degenerate days in the decorations of the body. She even sternly hinted that occasionally Dorothy "prinked" altogether too much for a girl with brains. What would she think of Mrs. Lewis Morgan? The dress which troubled him was one of those soft neutral-tinted cottons so common in these days, so entirely unfashionable in the fashionable world that Louise had already horrified her mother, and vexed Estelle, by persisting in her determination to have several of them. Once purchased, she had exercised her taste in the making, and her selections of patterns and trimming "fitted the material perfectly," so Estelle had told her, meaning anything but a compliment thereby.
It was simplicity itself in its finishings; yet the pattern was graceful in its folds and draperies, and fitted her form to perfection. The suit was finished at the throat with a rolling collar, inside of which Louise had basted a very narrow frill of soft yellowish lace. The close-fitting sleeves were finished in the same way. A very tiny scarlet knot of narrow ribbon at the throat completed the costume, and the whole effect was such that her husband, surveying her, believed he had never seen her better dressed, and was sure his mother would be shocked. The bewilderment on his face seemed to strike his wife as ludicrous.