coat was a sign of nobility. If you only knew, Pamela, how useless this
expensive finery is, how little it adds to your social status, how
little it enhances your beauty! Why, the finest gown this Madame
Theodore ever made cannot hide one of your wrinkles."

"My wrinkles!" cried Pamela, sorely wounded. "That is the first time I
ever heard of them. To think that my husband should be the first to
tell me I am getting an old woman! But I forgot, you are younger than
I, and I daresay in your eyes I seem quite old."

"My dear Pamela, be reasonable. Can a woman's forehead at forty be
quite as smooth as it was at twenty? However handsome a woman is at
that age--and to my mind it is almost the best age for beauty, just as
the ripe rich colouring of a peach is lovelier than the poor little
pale blossom that preceded it--however attractive a middle-aged woman
may be there must be some traces to show that she has lived half her
life; and to suppose that pain brule brocade, and hand-worked
embroidery, can obliterate those, is extreme folly. Dress in rich and
dark velvets, and old point-lace that has been twenty years in your
possession, and you will be as beautiful and as interesting as a
portrait by one of the old Venetian masters. Can Theodore's highest art
make you better than that? Remember that excellent advice of old
Polonius's,

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy.

It is the fancy that swells your milliner's bill, the newly-invented
trimmings, the complex and laborious combinations."

"I will be dreadfully economical in future, Conrad. For the last year I
have dressed to please you."

"But what becomes of all these gowns?" asked the Captain, folding up
the bill; "what do you do with them?"

"They go out."

"Out where? To the colonies?"

"No, dear; they go out of fashion; and I give them to Pauline."

"A sixty-guinea dress flung to your waiting-maid! The Duchess of
Dovedale could not do things in better style."

"I should be very sorry not to dress better than the Duchess," said
Mrs. Winstanley, "she is always hideously dowdy. But a duchess can
afford to dress as badly as she likes."

"I see. Then it is we only who occupy the border-land of society who
have to be careful. Well, my dear Pamela, I shall send Madame Theodore
her cheque, and with your permission close her account; and, unless you
receive some large accession of fortune I should recommend you not to
reopen it."