“I have got on as best I could,” she said, dispersing her last mouthful of pins all over her tiny chest. I was feeling a good deal better, and said I would slip on the garment. The picture she was to copy showed a slim and graceful creature with a long piece of soft material wound simply under one shoulder and over the other, caught in at the waist with a buckle, and falling in folds across the side of a very clinging underskirt. What I saw in the glass was a rain-water tub (surmounted by my head) covered with a closely gathered frill which was neatly sewn along the edge of the lid. The lid itself had some folds of the material arranged with geometrical precision round the place where the head came out. My breath forsook me. “Dear Miss McGregor,” I murmured, “you have not snipped all the stuff into small bits, have you? If you look at the picture you will see it is made all in one. Just folded round quite simply, beginning from one corner--so----” “I couldn’t quite understand how you would get it on and off the other way, Mrs. Molyneux,” she said, after a minute’s thoughtful silence, “and the effect is just the same. I have arranged the folds so that they hide the join.” I stood entranced by my reflection; I even began to take a morbid interest in it, as I saw how we depend for our personal attraction on clothes; it opened such a world of speculation amongst my friends. The knowledge was comforting to this extent: that there is more hope in a petition to one’s dressmaker to take back the dress she gave and change it than there would be in a request to one’s parents for a different face. With as little show of alteration as I could manage, I unripped the gathers, and taking a corner of the stuff I wrapped it round my form in the way I wanted, and stuck in a hat-pin to secure the last bit. “There,” I said triumphantly, “that is the way I want it to go.” Miss McGregor observed me with patient scepticism. “I don’t quite see how I am to arrange that,” she remarked. “You must not arrange it on any account,” I said. “It is to stay just like that.” “But how are you going to get out of it?” “Like this,” I replied, slipping the whole thing off my shoulders like a skin. “How I get back again next time is your concern; you are a dressmaker. Dresses like these are worn every day in Paris.” “Well, I don’t understand how they do it,” replied the forbearing creature. “You remind me,” I told her, “of a plumber we had here last spring. Mr. Molyneux gave him an order, and the man asked how he was to do it. ‘I don’t know,’ Mr. Molyneux said, ‘I am not a plumber.’ The silly man replied: ‘Well, I am a plumber and I don’t know.’ Now please don’t be like the plumber; we had quite enough of that sort of thing with him.” Miss McGregor poised herself upon one leg, cocked her head on one side, and said it wasn’t the way of the stuff. I know her ways by this time, so I said I was going out to tea.