artha
remembered when her bairn was just high enough to look into the
mirror), and pots of fresh flowers placed on the long table on which
her hooks used to rest. Two easy-chairs had also been brought up from
the sitting-room below, covered with new chintz and tied with blue
ribbons, and, more wonderful still, a candle-box had been covered with
cretonne and studded with brass tacks by the aid of Martha's stiff
fingers that her bairn might have a place in which to put her dainty
shoes and slippers.

When the trunks had been carried upstairs and Martha with her own hands
had opened my lady's gorgeous blue morocco dressing-case with its
bottles capped with gold and its brushes and fittings emblazoned with
cupids swinging in garlands of roses, the poor woman's astonishment
knew no bounds. The many scents and perfumes, the dainty boxes, big and
little, holding various powders--one a red paste which the old nurse
thought must be a salve, but about which, it is needless to say, she
was greatly mistaken--as well as a rabbit's foot smirched with rouge
(this she determined to wash at once), and a tiny box of court-plaster
cut in half moons. So many things, in fact, did the dear old nurse pull
from this wonderful bag that the modest little bureau could not hold
half of them, and the big table had to be brought up and swept of its
plants and belongings.

The various cosmetics and their uses were especial objects of comment.

"Did ye break one of the bottles, darlin'?" she asked, sniffing at a
peculiar perfume which seemed to permeate everything. "Some of 'em must
have smashed; it's awful strong everywhere--smell that"--and she held
out a bit of lace which she had taken from the case, a dressing-sacque
that Lucy had used on the steamer.

Lucy laughed. "And you don't like it? How funny, you dear old thing!
That was made specially for me; no one else in Paris has a drop."

And then the dresses! Particularly the one she was to wear the first
night--a dress flounced and furbelowed and of a creamy white (she still
wore mourning--delicate purples shading to white--the exact tone for a
husband six months dead). And the filmy dressing-gowns, and, more
wonderful than all, the puff of smoke she was to sleep in, held
together by a band of violet ribbon; to say nothing of the dainty
slippers bound about with swan's-down, and the marvellous hats, endless
silk stockings of mauve, white, and black, and long and short gloves.
In all her life