dust of the wayside--not but what the
seal-brown was adorable....

The spectacle grew dazzling, difficult for Steptoe to keep up with. He
and Letty were plainly objects of interest to these grand folk,
because there were now four or five of them. They advanced, receded,
came up and studied them, wheeled away, smiled sometimes at each other
with the high self-assurance of beauty and position, pranced, pawed,
curveted, were noble or coquettish as the inner self impelled, but
always the embodiment of overweening pride. Among the "real gentry,"
as he called them, there had unfailingly been for him and his
colleagues a courtesy which might have been called only a distinction
in equality, whereas these high-steppers....

It was a relief to see the French madam bustling in again from the
room at the back. Steptoe rose. He meant to express himself. Letty
hoped he would. For people who brought money in their hands this
treatment was too much. When Steptoe advanced to meet madam, she went
with him. As her champion she must bear him out.

But madam forestalled them. "I 'ope that mademoiselle has seen
something what she like. Me, I thought the brown costume--_coeur de le
marguerite jaune_ we call it ziz season----"

Letty was quick. She had heard of mannequins, the living models,
though so remotely as to give her no visualized impression. Suddenly
knowing what they had been looking at she adapted herself before
Steptoe could get his protest into words.

"I liked the seal-brown; but for me I thought the second one----"

Madame Simone nodded, sagely. "Why shouldn't mademoiselle 'ave both?"

Chapter XI

While this question was being put, and Steptoe was rising to what he
saw as the real occasion, Rashleigh Allerton too was having a new
experience. He couldn't understand it; he couldn't understand himself.
Not that that was strange, since he had hardly ever understood himself
at any time; but now he was, as he expressed it, "absolutely
stumped."

He had put on the table the bottle on which the kilted Highlander was
playing on the pipes; he had poured himself a glass. It was what he
called a good stiff glass, meant, metaphorically, to kill or cure, and
he hoped it would be to kill.

And that was all.

He had sat looking at it, or he had looked at it while walking about;
but he had only looked at it. It was as far as he could go. Now that
to go farther had become what he called a duty the perversity of his
nerves w