e her a great treat and,
perhaps, becoming proudly conscious of her beauty, had not determined,
in the August of her sixteenth year, to take her to Dublin for the
Horse Show week. She thrilled to the idea, not because she was anxious
to meet her own species but because she loved horses. They travelled
up by train from Galway through the vast monotonies of the Bog of
Allen, and put up at Maple's Hotel in Kildare Street, within five
minutes' walk of her maternal grandmother's shop. In those days no
Irish gentleman would have dreamed of dining in a public room, and they
took their meals sedately in a private apartment.

Gabrielle had never set foot in a city before. The smooth pavements,
the high buildings and the shop windows of Grafton Street excited her.
Everything in Dublin wore an air magnificent and spacious. Even the
ducks on the pond in the middle of Stephen's Green were exotic, and
like no other ducks that she had known. But she could not enjoy her
excitement to the full, for the feminine instinct in her realised from
the first that her clothes were different from those of the people
about her; and this disappointed her, for they were her best, made by
the urbane fingers of Monoghan, the tailor at Oughterard.

When she walked down Grafton Street she fancied that people stared at
her. It never struck her as possible that they were staring at her
vivid and unusual beauty. It struck her as funny that her father did
not seem to be aware of the discrepancy in her dress. He wasn't in the
least. He had taken his daughter for granted. In his unconscious
arrogance he imagined that the distinction of being a Hewish of
Roscarna was sufficient in itself to make her independant of externals,
and, as he proposed no alterations she trusted his judgment and they
went to the Horse Show together in their ill-cut tweeds.

Gabrielle was entranced by the jumping. Whenever a horse topped the
fences she straightened her back automatically as though she had been
riding herself. With such splendid animals as those she felt that she
could have made a better job of it. For the moment she forgot all
about her questionable clothes; but when, later in the day, she was
taken by her father to be presented to the Halbertons, the family of
the Devonshire peer with whom the Hewishes were connected, she became
immediately and horribly conscious of Lady Halberton's magnificence and
the elegance of her daughters. It shocked and thrill