"I forget it," says Dorian, professing the very deepest interest, "but I know it is all things." "No, it isn't: I can't bear the sleeves. Then"--discontentedly--"there is that velvet." "The very thing,"--enthusiastically. "Oh, Dorian, dear! What are you thinking of? Do remember how warm the weather is." "Well, so it is,--grilling," says Mr. Branscombe, nobly confessing his fault. "Do you like me in that olive silk?" asks she, hopefully, gazing at him with earnest intense eyes. "Don't I just?" returns he, fervently, rising to enforce his words. "Now, don't be sillier than you can help," murmurs she, with a lovely smile. "Don't! I like that gown myself, you know: it makes me look so nice and old, and that." "If I were a little girl like you," says Mr. Branscombe, "I should rather hanker after looking nice and young." "But not too much so: it is frivolous when one is once married." This pensively, and with all the air of one who has long studied the subject. "Is it? Of course you know best, your experience being greater than mine," says Dorian, meekly, "but, just for choice, I prefer youth to anything else." "Do you? Then I suppose I had better wear white." "Yes, do. One evening, in Paris, you wore a white gown of some sort, and I dreamt of you every night for a week afterwards." "Very well. I shall give you a chance of dreaming of me again," says Georgie, with a carefully suppressed sigh, that is surely meant for the beloved olive gown. The sigh is wasted. When she does don the white gown so despised, she is so perfect a picture that one might well be excused for wasting seven long nights in airy visions filled all with her. Some wild artistic marguerites are in her bosom (she plucked them herself from out the meadow an hour agone); her lips are red, and parted; her hair, that is loosely knotted, and hangs low down, betraying the perfect shape of her small head, is "yellow, like ripe corn." She smiles as she places her hand in Dorian's and asks him how she looks; while he, being all too glad because of her excessive beauty, is very slow to answer her. In truth, she is "like the snow-drop fair, and like the primrose sweet." At the castle she creates rather a sensation. Many, as yet, have not seen her; and these stare at her placidly, indifferent to the fact that breeding would have it otherwise. "What a peculiarly pretty young woman," says the duke, half an hour after her arrival, staring at her through his glasses. He had been absent when she came, and so is only just now awakened to a sense of her charms. "Who?--what?" says the duchess, vaguely, she being the person he has rashly addressed. She is very fat, very unimpressionable, and very fond of argument. "Oh! over there. I quite forget who she is. But I do see that Alfred is making himself, as usual, supremely ridiculous with her. With all his affected devotion to Helen, he runs after every fresh face he sees."