I read over what I had written and thanked Miss Izzy, but secretly I was not satisfied. I felt sure there was something wrong somewhere. It did not read well. I put it in an envelope, however, and posted it, though immediately afterwards I became more unhappy about it than ever. I made a mental note to ask Mrs. Carroll for information when I was at home at Christmas. CHAPTER XXVI I had been asked to the Gills’ for eight o’clock, and at half-past six I began to dress. After posting my acceptance my next care had been in regard to the clothes I should wear. There is no doubt greatly increased opportunities had tended to develop in me a latent dandyism. At all events I took the matter of my dress quite seriously, and had very definite ideas in regard to it. I went to the best tailor in town, my bills were sent on to Mrs. Carroll, and that was all I knew about them. I tried to get the soft greys and blacks and whites I admired in old Spanish and Dutch portraits, with perhaps a colour-note of olive green in my neck-tie, but always with the tones kept low and harmonious. Dandyism certainly, but it was in its way merely an expression of those same sensibilities that enabled me to see the charm of the pictures I have mentioned; that is to say, it was not based on any feeling of personal vanity, for I had no illusions in regard to my beauty. So, in this particular instance, I took immense pains to see that everything should be exactly right, and at the same time pleasing to myself. The cloth I had chosen was of the very blackest and finest and softest. Each garment had to be fitted on me till I could find no fault in it. The broad braid down the sides of my trousers seemed to me perfectly decorative. It was really in its use of linen that modern dress most conspicuously failed: what would Franz Hals or Velasquez have thought of the stiff, glazed collar convention obliged me to wear? When I had finished dressing I looked at myself critically in the inadequate glass, beside which I had set two or three candles, standing in pools of their own grease. It seemed to me that the peculiar, sullen expression of my face, caused by the formation of my forehead and the shape of my mouth, must always create an unfavourable impression. If I could recognise it myself, it would probably be a great deal more striking to other people. It disappeared when I smiled, but as soon as I stopped smiling it came back again. I went downstairs and strutted about before Miss Izzy and little Alice, that they might admire my fine feathers, and it was only when I reached the Gills that every other feeling was swallowed up in a horrible shyness.