“You may do as you please. Sheila and I are going to dine at the Star and Garter.”
“May I put on that blue dress?” said the girl, going up to her husband.
“Yes, of course, if you like,” said Lavender, meekly, going off to order the carriage, and wondering by what route he could drive those two maniacs down to Richmond, so that none of his friends should see them.
When he came back again, bringing with him a landau, which could be shut up for the homeward journey at night, he had to confess that no costume seemed to suit Sheila so well as the rough sailor-dress; and he was so pleased with her appearance that he consented at once to let Bras go with them in the carriage, on condition that Sheila should be responsible for him. Indeed, after the first shiver of driving away from the square was over, he forgot that there was much unusual about the look of his odd pleasure-party. If you had told him eighteen months before, that on a bright day in May, just as the people were going home from the Park for luncheon, he would go for a drive in a hired trap, with one horse, his companions being a man with a brown wide-awake, a girl, dressed as though she were the owner of a yacht, and an immense deerhound, and that in this fashion he would dare to drive up to the Star and Garter and order dinner, he would have bet five hundred to one that such a thing would never occur so long as he preserved his senses. But somehow he did not mind much. He was very much at home with those two people beside him; the day was bright and fresh; the horse went a good pace; and once they were over Hammersmith Bridge and out among fields and trees, the country looked exceedingly pretty, and the beauty of it was mirrored in Sheila’s eyes.
“I can’t quite make you out in that dress, Sheila,” he said “I am not sure whether it is real and business-like or a theatrical costume. I have seen girls on Ryde Pier with something of the same sort on, only a good deal more pronounced, you know, and they looked like sham yachtsmen; and I have seen stewardesses wearing that color and texture of cloth—”
“But why not have it as it is,” said Ingram—“a solitary costume produced by certain conditions of climate and duties, acting in conjunction with a natural taste for harmonious coloring and simple form? That dress, I will maintain, sprang as naturally from the salt sea as Aphrodite did; and the man who suspects artifice in it or invention, has had his mind perverted by the skepticism of modern society.”
“Is my dress so very wonderful?” said Sheila, with a grave complaisance. “I am pleased that the Lewis has produced such a fine thing, and perhaps you would like me to tell you its history. It was my papa bought a piece of blue serge in Stornoway; it cost three shillings sixpence a yard, and a dressmaker in Stornoway cut it for me, and I made it myself. That is all the history of the wonderful dress.”
Suddenly Sheila seized her husband’s arm. They had got down to the river by Mortlake; and there, on the broad bosom of the stream, a long and slender boat was shooting by, pulled by four oarsmen clad in white flannel.
“How can they go out in such a boat?” said Sheila, with great alarm visible in her eyes. “It is scarcely a boat at all; and if they touch a rock or the wind catches them—”
“Don’t be frightened, Sheila,” said her husband. “They are quite safe. There are no rocks in our rivers, and the wind does not give us squalls here like those on Loch Roag. You will see hundreds of those boats by and by, and perhaps you yourself will go out in one.”