Hers was not, it is true, the milliner’s paradise of Cherry and Primrose, but it was one into which she could only penetrate fitly clad.  What wonder then that, brought up without any tutoring in the excellencies of Nature, she should display the sad lack of true feeling so deplored in her later by that nice arbiter of taste, Miss Flora Le Pettit?

CHAPTER V:  IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN

Chapter V

IN WHICH LOVEDAY ESSAYS THE WHITE GOWN

With morning came thoughts of the practical side of the business and, the worst of her daily duties performed, Loveday ascended to her chamber to examine the scanty contents of her small oaken chest.  It was a sea-chest, legacy from her roving father, who had given it to her mother, and often enough had Aunt Senath expressed scruples about allowing her to keep a gift obtained so godlessly.  Perhaps the fact that it was a good chest and better than anything she could have bought had something to do with Aunt Senath’s complaisance in permitting it to remain.  Perhaps Loveday’s fierce look in defence of it was not without influence also.  The chest stayed in the little attic room, and made of it, to Loveday’s eyes, a place peculiarly her own, and rich because of its associations.  There was something about the chest, its dark polish and coarse carving, that even led her to think hopefully of its poor contents.

She crouched beside it now, upon her heels, and lifting the lid, gazed expectantly at what was revealed.

After all, it did not look so bad, just a level surface of white linen...

But, when she lifted it out, and all the yellow of age was revealed in the full gathers of the skirt, a shade passed over Loveday’s spirit.  How small and tight the bodice looked, how skimpy even the plaits of the skirt for the present modes ... yet it had been a good linen in its day, there was no doubt of that, this frock that had been stitched for her mother’s wedding gown.

For perhaps he had always been coming back to marry her, perhaps only their young blood and eager hearts beating so strongly within them had made the beat of wedding bells seem at first too slight a sound to catch their absorbed attention....  So Loveday the elder had always known, in spite of the sneers of the neighbours.  So Loveday the younger had maintained to carping girl-critics, though in her inmost heart she had never been able to feel it mattered so vastly, for half the girls she knew would have been in her predicament had their fathers been cut off untimely.  She knew it was not that she was born out of wedlock, a misfortune that might happen to anyone, which oppressed her youth, but the fact of her father having been a foreigner, and of that she was fiercely resolved to be proud.  Neither mother nor father had she ever known, but the instinct of generous youth is ever to defend the oppressed, and with her defence had love sprung in Loveday’s heart.  Therefore, even with her sensation of disappointment at the sight of the yellowed linen, there was reverence and tenderness in her touch as she laid the gown across her narrow bed.