"Dolly? Oh yes. Why not? They have a fine place out of town. Dolly will tell you about it when she has been there."
"And what must Dolly wear?" pursued Mrs. Copley.
"Wear? Oh, just what everybody wears. The regular thing, I suppose. Dolly may wear what she has a mind to."
"That is just what you know she cannot, Mr. Copley. At home she might; but these people here are so very particular."
"About dress? Not at all, my dear. English people let you go your own way in that as much as any people on the face of the earth. They do not care how you dress."
"They don't care, no," said Mrs. Copley; "they don't care if you went on your head; but all the same they judge you according to how you look and what you do. And us especially because we are foreigners. I don't want them to turn up their noses at Dolly because she is an American."
"I'd as lieve they did it for that as for anything," said Dolly laughing; "but I hope the people we are going to will know better."
"They will know better, there is no fear," answered her father.
The subject troubled Mrs. Copley's head, however, from that time till the day of the dinner; and even after Dolly and her father had driven off and were gone, she still debated with herself uneasily whether a darker dress would have done better, and whether Dolly ought to have had flowers in her hair, to make her very best impression upon her entertainers. For Dolly had elected to wear white, and would deck herself with no ornament at all, neither ribband nor flower. Mrs. Copley half grumbled, yet could not but allow to herself that there was nothing to wish for in the finished effect; and Dolly was allowed to depart; but as I said, after she was gone, Mrs. Copley went on troubling herself with doubts on the question.