Fraternity | Page 4

Each of these small clouds seemed fitted with a pair of unseen
wings, and, as insects flight on their too constant journeys, they were
setting forth all ways round this starry blossom which burned so clear
with the colour of its far fixity. On one side they were massed in fleecy

congeries, so crowding each other that no edge or outline was
preserved; on the other, higher, stronger, emergent from their
fellow-clouds, they seemed leading the attack on that surviving gleam
of the ineffable. Infinite was the variety of those million separate
vapours, infinite the unchanging unity of that fixed blue star.
Down in the street beneath this eternal warring of the various soft-
winged clouds on the unmisted ether, men, women, children, and their
familiars--horses, dogs, and cats--were pursuing their occupations with
the sweet zest of the Spring. They streamed along, and the noise of
their frequenting rose in an unbroken roar: "I, I-I, I!"
The crowd was perhaps thickest outside the premises of Messrs. Rose
and Thorn. Every kind of being, from the highest to the lowest, passed
in front of the hundred doors of this establishment; and before the
costume window a rather tall, slight, graceful woman stood thinking:
"It really is gentian blue! But I don't know whether I ought to buy it,
with all this distress about!"
Her eyes, which were greenish-grey, and often ironical lest they should
reveal her soul, seemed probing a blue gown displayed in that window,
to the very heart of its desirability.
"And suppose Stephen doesn't like me in it!" This doubt set her gloved
fingers pleating the bosom of her frock. Into that little pleat she folded
the essence of herself, the wish to have and the fear of having, the wish
to be and the fear of being, and her veil, falling from the edge of her hat,
three inches from her face, shrouded with its tissue her half-decided
little features, her rather too high cheek-bones, her cheeks which were
slightly hollowed, as though Time had kissed them just too much.
The old man, with a long face, eyes rimmed like a parrot's, and
discoloured nose, who, so long as he did not sit down, was permitted to
frequent the pavement just there and sell the 'Westminster Gazette',
marked her, and took his empty pipe out of his mouth.
It was his business to know all the passers-by, and his pleasure too; his
mind was thus distracted from the condition of his feet. He knew this

particular lady with the delicate face, and found her puzzling; she
sometimes bought the paper which Fate condemned him, against his
politics, to sell. The Tory journals were undoubtedly those which her
class of person ought to purchase. He knew a lady when he saw one. In
fact, before Life threw him into the streets, by giving him a disease in
curing which his savings had disappeared, he had been a butler, and for
the gentry had a respect as incurable as was his distrust of "all that class
of people" who bought their things at "these 'ere large establishments,"
and attended "these 'ere subscription dances at the Town 'All over
there." He watched her with special interest, not, indeed, attempting to
attract attention, though conscious in every fibre that he had only sold
five copies of his early issues. And he was sorry and surprised when
she passed from his sight through one of the hundred doors.
The thought which spurred her into Messrs. Rose and Thorn's was this:
"I am thirty-eight; I have a daughter of seventeen. I cannot afford to
lose my husband's admiration. The time is on me when I really must
make myself look nice!"
Before a long mirror, in whose bright pool there yearly bathed
hundreds of women's bodies, divested of skirts and bodices, whose
unruffled surface reflected daily a dozen women's souls divested of
everything, her eyes became as bright as steel; but having ascertained
the need of taking two inches off the chest of the gentian frock, one off
its waist, three off its hips, and of adding one to its skirt, they clouded
again with doubt, as though prepared to fly from the decision she had
come to. Resuming her bodice, she asked:
"When could you let me have it?"
"At the end of the week, madam."
"Not till then?"
"We are very pressed, madam."
"Oh, but you must let me have it by Thursday at the latest, please."

The fitter sighed: "I will do my best."
"I shall rely on you. Mrs. Stephen Dallison, 76, The Old Square."
Going downstairs she thought: "That poor girl looked very tired; it's a
shame they give them such long hours!" and she passed into the street.
A voice said timidly behind her: "Westminister, marm?"
"That's the poor old