am good."

To madam the suggestion had elements of mingled terror and attraction.
"But, Steptoe, I couldn't go out and take a walk unless I dressed up
in the new outdoor suit."

"And what did madam buy it for?--with the 'at and the vyle, and
everythink, just like the lyte Mrs. Allerton."

It was the argument she was hoping for. In the first place she was
used to the freedom of the streets; and in the second the outdoor suit
was calling her. Letty's love of dress was more than a love of
appearing at her best, though that love was part of it; it was a love
of the clothes themselves, of fabrics, colors, and fashions. When her
dreams were not of wandering knights who loved her at a
glance--bankers, millionaires, casting directors in motion-picture
studios, or, in high flights of imagination, incognito English
lords--they dealt in costumes of magic tissue, of hues suited to her
hair and eyes, in which the world saw and greeted her, not as the poor
little waif whom Judson Flack had put out of doors, but the true Letty
Gravely of romance. The Letty Gravely of romance was the real Letty
Gravely, a being set free from the cruel, the ugly, the carking, the
sordid, to flourish in a sunlight she knew to be shining somewhere.

Oddly enough her vision had come partly true; and yet so out of focus
that she couldn't see its truth. It was like the sunlight which she
knew to be shining somewhere, with a wrong refraction in its rays. The
world into which she had been carried was like that in a cubist
picture which someone had shown her at the studio. It bore a relation
to the world she knew, but a relation in which whatever she had
supposed to be perpendicular was oblique, and whatever she had
supposed to be oblique was horizontal, and nothing as she had been
accustomed to find it. It made her head swim. It was literally true
that she was afraid to move lest she should make a misstep through an
error in her sense of planes.

But clothes she understood. In the swirling of her universe they
formed a rock to which her intelligence could cling. They kept her
sane. In a sense they kept her happy. When all outside was confusion
and topsy-turvyness she could retire among Margot's cartons, and find
herself on solid ground. I should be sorry to record the hours she
spent before the long mirror in the little back spare room. Here her
imagination could give itself free range. She was Luciline Lynch, and
Mercola Merch, and Lisabel Anstey, and a