Page:Alice Lauder.pdf/71

snow-covered peaks; nor can I see the glitter of the sea that lies under our windows, though I hear the waves playing and racing among the rocks below, and sometimes catch sight of a white feather of spray dashing over the low terrace wall next the shore. The west wind feels as soft as silk on one’s face, and it carries past an endless stream of thistle seed, floating argosies of eider-down, blown from inland pastures, and now drifting in endless procession out to sea.

“It is so hot that I have discarded my much-travelled grey tweed, and now disport myself in a last year’s tea-gown of blue China crêpe; that is, an unthinking world might call it blue; a brunette would denounce it as green, and a dressmaker would talk of eau-de-nil—but it is none of these, and yet it is all of them by turns and nothing long, like the great Rochester. I can’t tell you how it is made, for it is so lightly, beautifully built by Julie Bond, that no one but an expert or the man-milliner of a fin-de-siècle novel could possibly analyze its character. You just get a general effect of long flowing sleeves and curiously involved draperies, and a slight scintilla of steel embroidery here and there; and a decided impression of something original and expensive,—yes, expensive at all risks, there