Rousing herself, Alice read it eagerly. The contents did not seem particularly to please her, for, as she refolded the paper, she looked grave, and gave vent to a mild sigh. “Do not undraw the curtain,” she said: “come again in an hour, Ellis; I feel sleepy, and there is nothing to get up for,” she added, in a slightly pettish tone. Falling asleep the moment she laid her head upon the pillow, Alice dreamed that when she came down to breakfast she found Harry had returned, saying that he could not bear to leave her alone all day, and so had come back and wished to drive her to call upon that agreeable woman, Mrs. Felicia Tabinette (a name with which she was inspired for the occasion, as no such neighbour existed), to which proposition she gladly assenting, they had gone out in a pony-chaise made of coral and mother-of-pearl, and drawn by two lovely little sea-green ponies with lilac manes and tails, and harness made of the best point lace. And she was just advancing the unanswerable proposition that, as lace was the fittest material of which to make a lady’s collar, it must also be the most proper fabric for that of a horse, when the inexorable Ellis appeared for the second time, and dispelled all her bright visions by awakening her to the dull reality. Alice, however, took her revenge upon that “dis-illusioning”--as a Frenchman would have called it--lady’s-maid, for she was more fastidious and difficult to please, and almost snappish, than Ellis had ever known her before, insomuch that the excellent Abigail afterwards propounded her opinion in the servants’ hall, that “Missus was _tuter fay_ outer sorts,” which disheartening fact she accounted for by the hypothesis that she--Mrs. Coverdale--must have got out of bed with the wrong foot foremost.