"If it be no post-chaise, at all events ladies wearing crinolines have sat inside it, that is certain, and gentlemen wearing peg-top trousers with braid upon them. Good God, Doris, if you were to wear a crinoline I should love you beyond hope of repentance. Don't I remember when I was a boy every one wore white stockings; I had only heard of black ones, and I always hoped to meet a lady wearing black stockings... now my hope is to meet one wearing white." "We might have searched the town for a crinoline and a pair of white stockings." "Yes, and I might have discovered a black silk stock. I wonder how I should have looked in it. Doris," I said, "we have missed the best part of our adventure. We forgot to dress for the part we are playing, the lovers of Orelay." Who will disagree with me when I say that no adventure is complete unless it necessitates an amount of ceremonial, the wearing of wigs, high bodices, stockings, and breeches? Every one likes to dress himself up, whether for a masquerade ball or to be enrolled in some strange order. Have you, reader, ever seen any one enrolled in any of these orders? If you have, you will excuse the little comedy and believe it to be natural--the comedy that Doris and I played in the old carriage driving from Orelay to Verlancourt, where we hoped to breakfast. We could hardly speak for excitement. Doris thought of how she would look in a crinoline, and I remembered the illustrations in an early edition of Balzac of which I am the happy possessor. How nice the men looked in the light trousers and the black stockings of the period; and crossing my legs I followed with interest the line of my calf. Somebody did that in "Les Illusions Perdues." She and I lay back thinking which story in "The Human Comedy" was the most applicable to our case; and the only one we could think of was when Madame Bargeton, a provincial blue-stocking, left Angoulême for Paris with Lucien de Rubempré. There were no railways in the forties; they must have travelled in a post-chaise. Yes, I remember their journey, faintly it is true, but I remember it. Madame Bargeton was a woman of five-and-thirty at least, and Doris was much younger. Lucien was only one-and-twenty, and even at that time I was more than that. The names of these people and of the people they met at the theatre and in the Tuileries Gardens--Rastignac, Madame d'Espard, the Duchess of Chaulieu, Madame de Rochefide, and Canalis--carried my mind back from crinolines and white stockings, from peg-top trousers and braided coats, to the slim trousers that were almost breeches and to the high-breasted gowns of the Restoration. Our mothers and fathers wore the crinolines and the peg-top trousers, and our grandfathers the tight trousers and the black silk stocks. The remembrance of these costumes filled me with a tenderness and a melancholy I could not subdue, and I could see that Doris was thinking of the same subject as myself.