, darkly burnished and sunset-shot with
threads of bronze. "Lawrence has never seen it loose," she
reflected: "surely I am rather pretty?" and then "Oh, oh, I shall
be late!" and Isabel's dreams were drenched and scattered under
the shock of cold water.

Dreamlike the run through the warm September landscape: dreamlike
the slip of country platform, where, while Lawrence took their
tickets, she and Laura walked up and down and fingered the tall
hollyhocks flowering upward in quilled rosettes of lemon-yellow
and coral red, like paper lanterns lit by a fairy lamplighter on
a spiral stair: and most dreamlike of all the discovery that the
Exeter express had been flagged for them and that she was
expected to precede Laura into a reserved first class carriage.
It was not more than once or twice in a year that Isabel went by
train, and she had never travelled but third class in her life.
How smoothly life runs for those who have great possessions! How
polite the railway staff were! The station master himself held
open the door for the Wanhope party. Now she knew Mr. Chivers
very well, but in all previous intercourse one finger to his cap
had been enough for young Miss Isabel. Certainly it was
agreeable, this hothouse atmosphere. "Shall you feel cold?"
Lawrence asked, and Isabel, murmuring "No, thank you," blushed in
response to the touch of formality in his manner. She felt what
women often feel in the early stages of a love affair, that he
had been nearer to her when he was not there, than now when they
were together in the presence of a third person. She had grown
shy and strange before this careless composed man lounging
opposite her with his light overcoat thrown open and his crush
hat on his knees, conventionally polite, his long legs stretched
out sideways to give her and Laura plenty of room.

And Lawrence on the journey neither spoke to her nor watched her,
though Isabel shone in borrowed plumes. There had been no time
to buy clothes, and so Val, though grudgingly, had allowed Laura
and Yvonne to ransack their shelves and presses for Cinderella's
adornment. But one glance had painted her portrait for him, tall
and slender in a long sealskin coat of Yvonne's which was rulled
and collared and flounced with fur, her glossy hair parted on one
side and drawn back into what she called a soup-plate of plaits.
Once only he directly addressed her, when Laura loosened her own
sables. "Do undo your coat, won't you?