Sylvia dressed for dinner literally like one in a dream.  Outwardly she was so calm that she thought she was so inwardly.  It was nothing like so exciting as people said, to get engaged, she thought as she brushed out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot.  Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse.  She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by snatches—­there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing.  And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented facade.  The great hall had seemed familiar to her already as she stepped across it on her way to the stairs, her feet had pressed the rugs with assurance, she had been able to be quite nonchalant about refusing the services of the maid who offered to help her dress.

It was true that from time to time she suddenly flushed or paled; it was true that her mind seemed incapable of the slightest consecutive thought; it was true that she seemed to be in a dream, peopled by crazily inconsequent images—­she had again and again a vision, startlingly vivid, of the red-twigged osier beside which she had stood; it was true that she had a slight feeling of vertigo when she tried to think ahead of the next moment—­but still she was going ahead with her unpacking and dressing so steadily that she marveled.  She decided again from the depth of her experience that getting engaged was nothing like so upsetting an event as people made out.  She thrust the last pin into her hair and tipped her head preeningly before the big triplicate mirror—­the first time she had ever encountered this luxury outside of a ready-made clothes shop.  The yellow chiffon came out from the trunk in perfect condition, looking like a big, silk-petaled flower as she slipped it on over her bare shoulders, and emerged above, triumphant and yet half afraid to look at herself in the mirror lest she should see that her home-made toilet had not “the right look.”  One glance satisfied even her jealous eagerness.  It had exactly the right look—­that is, it looked precisely like the picture from which she had copied it.  She gazed with naive satisfaction at the faithfulness with which her reflected appearance resembled that of the Parisian demi-mondaine whose photograph she had seen, and settled on her slim, delicately modeled shoulders the straps of shirred and beaded chiffon which apparently performed the office of keeping her dress from sliding to the floor.  In reality, under its fluid, gauzy draperies, it was constructed on a firm, well-fitting, well-fastened foundation of opaque cloth which quite adequately clothed the young body, but its appearance was of a transparent cloud, only kept from floating entirely away by those gleaming straps on the shoulders, an effect carefully calculated in the original model, and inimitably caught by Sylvia’s innocent fingers.