Page:An American Girl in India.djvu/35

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ERMYNTRUDE AND I SET OUT
25

that I looked just as smart as anybody there. Now, I always make a point of dressing suitably. When I go to a garden-party, I do the thing properly in lace and furbelows. When I cycle, I do it in a neat white drill or blue serge skirt; and when I travel, I don't look as if I were going to a church parade in Hyde Park. Some people have no idea of the fitness of things. Now, there was Marjory Manifold, got up as if she were going to a first-class wedding in Hanover Square, when, in reality, she was going on a dirty Dover-Calais boat, where she would probably be very ill, and then on the most disarranging journey possible at bone-shaking speed across France. I smiled as I thought of Marjory in that get-up a few hours hence. Now, I was dressed in dark blue cloth, plain, but well made—anybody could see that—and a simple black hat with feathers, and a fur boa, and, above all, I had that pleasing glow that comes only from the consciousness of being well dressed. I ask any woman, Is there any feeling that bucks you up like that? Now Lady Manifold had gone to the other extreme. She was one of that very large class of Britons who think anything good enough for a journey, and she must have routed out all the oldest things that she possessed. The worst of it was that her things fitted her so badly that they looked as if they could not possibly have been made for her, and that absurd little straw hat, thirty years too young for her, might easily have been one that Marjory had no longer any use for. How Marjory could have allowed her to come out like that I can't imagine. I was quite