“From my own money I buy all this,” Frau Nirlanger confided to me, with a gay little laugh of excitement, as we started out. “From Vienna it comes. Always I have given it at once to my husband, as a wife should. Yesterday it came, but I said nothing, and when my husband said to me, ‘Anna, did not the money come as usual to-day? It is time,’ I told a little lie—but a little one, is it not? Very amusing it was. Almost I did laugh. Na, he will not be cross when he see how his wife like the Amerikanische ladies will look. He admires very much the ladies of Amerika. Many times he has said so.” (“I’ll wager he has—the great, ugly boor!” I thought, in parenthesis.) “We’ll show him!” I said, aloud. “He won’t know you. Such a lot of beautiful clothes as we can buy with all this money. Oh, dear Frau Nirlanger, it’s going to be slathers of fun! I feel as excited about it as though it were a trousseau we were buying.” “So it is,” she replied, a little shadow of sadness falling across the brightness of her face. “I had no proper clothes when we were married—but nothing! You know perhaps my story. In America, everyone knows everything. It is wonderful. When I ran away to marry Konrad Nirlanger I had only the dress which I wore; even that I borrowed from one of the upper servants, on a pretext, so that no one should recognize me. Ach Gott! I need not have worried. So! You see, it will be after all a trousseau.” Why, oh, why should a woman with her graceful carriage and pretty vivacity have been cursed with such an ill-assorted lot of features! Especially when certain boorish young husbands have expressed an admiration for pink-and-white effects in femininity. “Never mind, Mr. Husband, I’ll show yez!” I resolved as the elevator left us at the floor where waxen ladies in shining glass cases smiled amiably all the day. There must be no violent pinks or blues. Brown was too old. She was not young enough for black. Violet was too trying. And so the gowns began to strew tables and chairs and racks, and still I shook my head, and Frau Nirlanger looked despairing, and the be-puffed and real Irish-crocheted saleswoman began to develop a baleful gleam about the eyes. And then we found it! It was a case of love at first sight. The unimaginative would have called it gray. The thoughtless would have pronounced it pink. It was neither, and both; a soft, rosily-gray mixture of the two, like the sky that one sometimes sees at winter twilight, the pink of the sunset veiled by the gray of the snow clouds. It was of a supple, shining cloth, simple in cut, graceful in lines. “There! We’ve found it. Let’s pray that it will not require too much altering.”