, absolute in its policy of
reticence. Miss Quincey had just decided that it had a thought too much
mauve in it, and was most successfully routing desire by depreciation of
its object when a shopman stepped on to the stage, treading airily among
the gauzes and the flowers. There was no artifice about the young man; it
was in the dreamiest abstraction that he clasped that fair form round the
collar and turned it to the light. It shuddered like a living thing; its
violent mauve vanished in silver grey. The effect was irresistible. Miss
Quincey was tempted beyond all endurance; and she fell. Once in
possession of the blouse, its price, a guinea, paid over the counter,
Miss Quincey was all discretion. She carried her treasure home in a
pasteboard box concealed under her cape; lest its shameless arrival in
Hunter's van should excite scandal and remark.

That night, behind a locked door, Miss Quincey sat up wrestling and
battling with her blouse. To Miss Quincey in the watches of the night it
seemed that a spirit of obstinate malevolence lurked in that deceitful
garment. Like all the things in Hunter's shop, it was designed for
conventional well-rounded womanhood. It repudiated the very idea of Miss
Quincey; in every fold it expressed its contempt for her person; its
collar was stiff with an invincible repugnance. Miss Quincey had to take
it in where it went out, and let it out where it went in, to pinch, pull,
humour and propitiate it before it would consent to cling to her
diminished figure. When all was done she wrapped it in tissue paper and
hid it away in a drawer out of sight, for the very thought of it
frightened her. But when next she went to look at it she hardly knew it
again. The malignity seemed all smoothed out of it; it lay there with its
meek sleeves folded, the very picture of injured innocence and reproach.
Miss Quincey thought she might get reconciled to it in time. A day might
even come when she would be brave enough to wear it.

Not many days after, Miss Quincey might have been seen coming out of St.
Sidwell's with a reserved and secret smile playing about her face; so
secret and so reserved, that nobody, not even Miss Quincey, could tell
what it was playing at.

Miss Quincey was meditating an audacity.

That night she took pen and paper up to her bedroom and sat down to write
a little note. Sat down to write it and got up again; wrote it and tore
it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open