riages were to move on, and they
rolled on, now blocked under the black rain-dripping archway of the
Castle yard, now delayed as they laboriously made the tour of the
quadrangle. Olive doubted if her turn would ever come; but, by slow
degrees, each carriage discharged its cargo of silk, and at last Mrs.
Barton and her daughters found themselves in the vestibule, taking
numbers for their wraps at the cloak-rooms placed on either side of the
stairway.

The slender figures ascending to tiny naked shoulders, presented a
piquant contrast with the huge, black Assyrian, bull-like policemen, who
guarded the passage, and reduced, by contrast, to almost doll-like
proportions the white creatures who went up the great stairway. Overhead
an artificial plant, some twenty feet wide, spread a decorative
greenness; the walls were lined with rifles, and at regular intervals,
in lieu of pictures, were set stars made out of swords. There were also
three suits of plate armour, and the grinning of the helmets of old-time
contrasted with the bearskin-shrouded faces of the red guardsmen. And
through all this military display the white ware tripped past powdered
and purple-coated footmen, splendid in the splendour of pink calves and
salmon-coloured breeches.

As the white mass of silk pushed along the white-painted corridor, the
sense of ceremony that had till then oppressed it, evaporated in the
fumes of the blazing gas, and something like a battle began in the blue
drawing-room. Heat and fatigue soon put an end to all coquetting between
the sexes. The beautiful silks were hidden by the crowd; only the
shoulders remained, and, to appease their terrible ennui, the men gazed
down the backs of the women's dresses. Shoulders were there, of all
tints and shapes. Indeed, it was like a vast rosary, alive with white,
pink, and cream-coloured flowers; of Marechal Niels, Souvenir de
Malmaisons, Mademoiselle Eugene Verdiers, Aimee Vibert Scandens. Sweetly
turned, adolescent shoulders, blush-white, smooth and even as the petals
of a Marquise Mortemarle; the strong, commonly turned shoulders,
abundant and free as the fresh rosy pink of the Anna Alinuff; the
drooping white shoulders, full of falling contours as a pale Madame
Lacharme; the chlorotic shoulders, deadly white, of the almost greenish
shade that is found in a Princess Clementine; the pert, the dainty
little shoulders, filled with warm pink shadows, pretty and compact as
Countess Cecile de Chabr