Anastasia's many maxims. So we spent the morning in Bond Street, buying recklessly and wildly at Vuitton's and at that place where you get the "Innovation" trunks that look like a glorified wardrobe—all hangers and drawers. I did all the ordering. Million stood by and looked like a scared kitten. When the time came she signed the cheques and gasped, "Lor', Miss!" "Million, you're not to say 'Lor''," I ordered her in a stage whisper. [Pg 61] I turned away from the polished shop assistants who, I should think, must have had the morning of their lives. I wonder what they made of their customers, the two young women (one with a strong Cockney accent) who dressed as if from a country rectory jumble sale and who purchased trunks as if for a duchess's trousseau? [Pg 61] "And you are not to say 'Miss.' Do remember, Million," I urged her. "Now we'll have a taxi. Two taxis, I mean." One taxi was piled high with the new and princely pile of "leather goods." Hat-boxes, dress-baskets, two Innovation trunks, a week-end bag, and a dressing-case with crystal and ivory fittings. The other taxi bore off the small, "my-Sunday-out"-looking figure of Miss Million and the equally small, almost equally badly dressed figure of Miss Million's maid. We drove first to the Kensington Hostelry and picked up the old luggage. By the side of the new it looked not even as respectable as an Irish emigrant's; it looked like some Kentish hop-picker's! We made the driver unstrap and open one of the large new dress-baskets. And into this we dumped the hold-all and the tin trunk that seemed to be labelled "My First Place." Then I ordered him to drive to the Hotel Cecil, and off we whirled again. Our arrival at the Cecil was marked by quite a dramatic little picture; like something on the stage, I thought. For as our taxi swept around the big circle of the courtyard of the hotel, as it glided up exactly opposite [Pg 62] the middle door and a couple of gorgeously uniformed commissionaires stepped forward, the air was rent by the long, piercingly shrill notes of a posthorn. There was the staccato clatter of horses' hoofs, and there rattled and jingled up to the entrance a coach of lemon-yellow-and-black, with four magnificent white horses, driven by a very big and strongly built, ruddy-faced, white-toothed young man, wearing a tall white hat, a black-and-white check
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