“Feathers, now,” he said a little satirically. “Might not a girl wear a couple of really good, expensive ostrich plumes, or whatever you call them—the things that hang down the back like a sort of Niagara of fluff—if they were sent to her by a man with facilities for buying direct from South Africa?”

“Oh, yes,” I said readily, feeling as if I were an editress answering “Queries on Etiquette.” “Feathers are quite as permissible as furs.”

“Even supposing them to be very costly? Worth as much, say, as five times the amount of the rest of the lady’s wardrobe?”

“It’s nothing to do with the cost,” I explained patiently. “A twenty-guinea fox stole a girl might accept from a man. A four-pound frock she couldn’t.”

“I confess I don’t understand these nuances,” said Mr. Waters, almost absent-mindedly.

I said, “Any girl would.”

“Possibly. I can’t help wondering what held good instead of the fur-and-feathers edict in the days when they composed——What I was going to say,” he broke off quickly, “was that I always imagined that young French girls were brought up to be more strict in these matters than English ones. Yet I know a French girl—”

(Surprising! He knows a girl!)

[65]

[65]

—“her father’s an old business acquaintance of mine—”

(Ah, that explains it.)

—“and neither her father nor the young lady seemed to find anything curious about the matter, when, in payment of some bet made at a flying-meeting, I bought her quite a large boxful of pairs of gloves.”

“Oh, gloves! Anybody can give gloves to anybody,” I told him. “Gloves aren’t like clothes.”

“No, but I see some clothes about nowadays that are uncommonly like gloves!”

Could it have been the Governor who muttered this sotto voce to himself?

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