umbrella--
Innocent Smith wanted to have enlarged and put up in the hall,
like a sort of fresco, with the inscription,--

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control--
These three alone will make a man a prig."

-- Tennyson.

Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than
the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow
blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went
with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing
that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith
pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously)
that ladies might combine economy with magnificence if they would draw
light chalk patterns on a plain dress and then dust them off again.
He set up "Smith's Lightning Dressmaking Company," with two screens,
a cardboard placard, and box of bright soft crayons; and Miss Diana
actually threw him an abandoned black overall or working dress on
which to exercise the talents of a modiste. He promptly produced
for her a garment aflame with red and gold sunflowers; she held
it up an instant to her shoulders, and looked like an empress.
And Arthur Inglewood, some hours afterwards cleaning his bicycle
(with his usual air of being inextricably hidden in it), glanced up;
and his hot face grew hotter, for Diana stood laughing for one
flash in the doorway, and her dark robe was rich with the green
and purple of great decorative peacocks, like a secret garden
in the "Arabian Nights." A pang too swift to be named pain
or pleasure went through his heart like an old-world rapier.
He remembered how pretty he thought her years ago, when he was
ready to fall in love with anybody; but it was like remembering
a worship of some Babylonian princess in some previous existence.
At his next glimpse of her (and he caught himself awaiting it)
the purple and green chalk was dusted off, and she went by quickly
in her working clothes.

As for Mrs. Duke, none who knew that matron could conceive her as
actively resisting this invasion that had turned her house upside down.
But among the most exact observers it was seriously believed that she
liked it. For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all
men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
And it is doubtful if she really saw anything more eccentric or
inexplicable in Smith's chimney-