d some other gentlemen and ladies
that's coming on from somewhere.

"And, Smith! I don't think I'm going to wear that white frock you're
putting out there," concluded my young mistress, rather breathlessly;
"there don't seem to me to be enough style about it for the occasion;
I'll wear me cerise evening one with the spangles."

"Cerise? But you haven't got a cerise evening frock," I began. "I didn't
let you order that----"

Then I caught Million's half-rueful, half-triumphant glance at a new
white carton box on the wicker chair beside her bed. And I saw what had
happened.

No sooner was her maid's back turned than Miss Million had wired, or
telephoned, or perhaps called at that shop, and secured that
cherry-coloured creation. It would have looked daringly effective
on--say, Miss Lee White in an Alhambra burlesque. On little Million it
would have a vulgarity not to be described in words. I'd thought I'd
guided her safely away from it! And now this!

"Yes, you see I thought better of buying that gown," said the heiress,
flushed but defiant. "You see, you were wrong about those very bright
shades not being the c'rect thing; why, look at what that Lady
Golightly-Long had got on her back! Red and green and blue trimmings,
and I don't know what all, all stuck on at once. And she ought to know
what's what, if anybody did," Million persisted, "c'nsidering she's a
Earl's cousin and one of the Highest in the Land!"

"Certainly one of the longest," I said, thinking of those unending
lissom limbs swathed in the Futurist draperies of that cobra-woman.

Million went on to inform me, impressively, that this lady, too, was "a
Perfeshional." Does classic dancing, they call it. Needn't do it for her
living, of course. But she says she's 'wrapped up in the Art of it.'
Likes to do what she likes, I s'pose she means.

"She's got a lovely home of her own, Miss Vi Vassity told me, in
Aberdeenshire.

"Not only that, but a big bungalow she has near the river. Sometimes she
has down parties of her own particular friends to watch her dancing on
the lawn there, in the moonlight. And, Smith!" Here Million gave a
little skip out of her skirt, "What jer think?"

"What?" I asked, as I drew the cerise frock from its wrappings. (Worse,
far worse than in the shop. Still, I'd got to let her wear it, I
suppose. And it may be drowned by Miss Vi Vassity's voice at the
supper-table.)

"Why, she's going to ask me down there, too, to one of her we