Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/35
Only a woman could have guessed what that dress would cost to “do up” alone. Alice Lauder’s frock had, alas! been done up several hundred times; the iron had entered into its soul, as it were. But it was clean and cool, and if a couple of buttons had come off in the wash, and if a bunch of “gathers” had been hastily tucked in under the waistband, what are unconsidered trifles like these compared with an artistic soul?
Alice began to strike the keys with emphatic realization of Miriam’s song:
The horse and his rider hath he cast into the sea.”
From the expression of her eyes and fingers you might have imagined that she was condemning some unseen foe to the fate of the horse and his rider. What she really thought was this—“Bronze silk stockings, too, to match her shoes—what extravagances! And yet they look nice, perhaps!”
“Won’t you try Mozart again?” said Campbell, as she paused in following out Miriam’s song of triumph; for he was always wanting to try something again. And so the sonata went on d. c. till lunch time.
It was just about this time that the passengers began to discover, in twos and threes, that