It's hot tonight for
September."

"I'm not hot, thank you," said Isabel stiffly: but slowly, as if
against her will, she opened the collar of her coat and pushed it
back from her young neck and the crossed folds of her lace gown.
The gown was very old, it had indeed belonged to Laura Selincourt: it
was because Laura loved its soft, graceful, dateless lines that it
had survived so long. She had seized on it with her unerring tact:
this was right for Isabel, this dim transparency of rosepoint
modelling itself over the immature slenderness of nineteen: and she
and her maid Catherine and Mrs. Bendish had spent patient hours
trying it on and modifying it to suit the fashion of the day. Laura
had refused to impose upon Isabel either her own modish elegance or
Yvonne's effect of the arresting and bizarre. "Isn't she almost too
slight for it?" Yvonne had asked, and Laura for all answer had
hummed a little French song--

'Mignonne allons voir si la rose
Qui ce matin avoit desclose
Sa robe de pourpre au soleil
A point perdu ceste vespree
I as plis de sa robe pourpree
Et son teint au votre pareil . . .'

She discerned in Isabel that quality of beauty, noble, spirited,
and yet wistful, which requires a most expensive setting of
simplicity. And that was why Isabel opened her coat. If Captain
Hyde had admired her in her Chilmark muslin, what would he think
of flounce and fold of rose-point of Alencon under Yvonne's
perfumed furs? And then she blushed again because the yearning
in his eyes made her wonder if he cared after all whether she
wore lace or cotton. Everything was so strange!

Strangest of all it was, to the brink of unreality, that Laura
evidently remained blind. But Laura was always blind. "Why, she
never even sees Val!" reflected Isabel scornfully. And yet--
suppose Isabel were deceiving herself? What if Captain Hyde were
not in earnest? But her older self comforted her child's self:
careless was he, and composed? "You were not always so composed,
Lawrence," in her own mind the elder Isabel mocked him with her
sparkling eyes.

Waterloo, lamplit and resonant: the pulsing of many lamps, the
hurry of many steps, the flitting by of many faces under an arch
of gloom: dark quiet and the scent of violets in a waiting car.

"What a jolly taxi!" Isabel exclaimed. "I never was in a taxi
like this before. Is it a more expensive kind?"

"My