Amongst the poorer ranks of Miss Quincey’s profession the sumptuary laws are exceptionally severe.  It is a crime, a treachery, to spend money on mere personal adornment.  You are clothed, not for beauty’s sake, but because the rigour of the climate and of custom equally require it.  Miss Quincey’s conscience pricked her all the time that she stood looking in at Hunter’s window.  Never before had she suffered so terrible a solicitation of the senses.  It was as if all those dim and germinal desires had burst and blossomed in this sinful passion for a blouse.  She resisted, faltered, resisted; turned away and turned back again.  The blouse sat immovable on its wooden bust, absolute in its policy of reticence.  Miss Quincey had just decided that it had a thought too much mauve in it, and was most successfully routing desire by depreciation of its object when a shopman stepped on to the stage, treading airily among the gauzes and the flowers.  There was no artifice about the young man; it was in the dreamiest abstraction that he clasped that fair form round the collar and turned it to the light.  It shuddered like a living thing; its violent mauve vanished in silver grey.  The effect was irresistible.  Miss Quincey was tempted beyond all endurance; and she fell.  Once in possession of the blouse, its price, a guinea, paid over the counter, Miss Quincey was all discretion.  She carried her treasure home in a pasteboard box concealed under her cape; lest its shameless arrival in Hunter’s van should excite scandal and remark.

That night, behind a locked door, Miss Quincey sat up wrestling and battling with her blouse.  To Miss Quincey in the watches of the night it seemed that a spirit of obstinate malevolence lurked in that deceitful garment.  Like all the things in Hunter’s shop, it was designed for conventional well-rounded womanhood.  It repudiated the very idea of Miss Quincey; in every fold it expressed its contempt for her person; its collar was stiff with an invincible repugnance.  Miss Quincey had to take it in where it went out, and let it out where it went in, to pinch, pull, humour and propitiate it before it would consent to cling to her diminished figure.  When all was done she wrapped it in tissue paper and hid it away in a drawer out of sight, for the very thought of it frightened her.  But when next she went to look at it she hardly knew it again.  The malignity seemed all smoothed out of it; it lay there with its meek sleeves folded, the very picture of injured innocence and reproach.  Miss Quincey thought she might get reconciled to it in time.  A day might even come when she would be brave enough to wear it.

Not many days after, Miss Quincey might have been seen coming out of St. Sidwell’s with a reserved and secret smile playing about her face; so secret and so reserved, that nobody, not even Miss Quincey, could tell what it was playing at.

Miss Quincey was meditating an audacity.