“I am sure you did your best, my dear.  It is just like the caps all the ladies in Cranford are wearing, and they have had theirs for a year, I dare say.  I should have liked something newer, I confess—­something more like the turbans Miss Betty Barker tells me Queen Adelaide wears; but it is very pretty, my dear.  And I dare say lavender will wear better than sea-green.  Well, after all, what is dress, that we should care anything about it?  You’ll tell me if you want anything, my dear.  Here is the bell.  I suppose turbans have not got down to Drumble yet?”

So saying, the dear old lady gently bemoaned herself out of the room, leaving me to dress for the evening, when, as she informed me, she expected Miss Pole and Mrs Forrester, and she hoped I should not feel myself too much tired to join the party.  Of course I should not; and I made some haste to unpack and arrange my dress; but, with all my speed, I heard the arrivals and the buzz of conversation in the next room before I was ready.  Just as I opened the door, I caught the words, “I was foolish to expect anything very genteel out of the Drumble shops; poor girl! she did her best, I’ve no doubt.”  But, for all that, I had rather that she blamed Drumble and me than disfigured herself with a turban.

Miss Pole was always the person, in the trio of Cranford ladies now assembled, to have had adventures.  She was in the habit of spending the morning in rambling from shop to shop, not to purchase anything (except an occasional reel of cotton or a piece of tape), but to see the new articles and report upon them, and to collect all the stray pieces of intelligence in the town.  She had a way, too, of demurely popping hither and thither into all sorts of places to gratify her curiosity on any point—­a way which, if she had not looked so very genteel and prim, might have been considered impertinent.  And now, by the expressive way in which she cleared her throat, and waited for all minor subjects (such as caps and turbans) to be cleared off the course, we knew she had something very particular to relate, when the due pause came—­and I defy any people possessed of common modesty to keep up a conversation long, where one among them sits up aloft in silence, looking down upon all the things they chance to say as trivial and contemptible compared to what they could disclose, if properly entreated.  Miss Pole began —

“As I was stepping out of Gordon’s shop to-day, I chanced to go into the ‘George’ (my Betty has a second-cousin who is chambermaid there, and I thought Betty would like to hear how she was), and, not seeing anyone about, I strolled up the staircase, and found myself in the passage leading to the Assembly Room (you and I remember the Assembly Room, I am sure, Miss Matty! and the minuets de la cour!); so I went on, not thinking of what I was about, when, all at once, I perceived that I was in the middle of the preparations for to-morrow night—­the room