Ariadne bought some grey and scarlet Japanese stuff that only cost ninepence-halfpenny a yard to make her ball-frock without consulting either of us. Christina said _Quem Deus vult_--and that though you might look Japanese for ninepence-halfpenny a yard, you never could look smart. And it was quite true. Ariadne's body was all over the place, with scientific seams meandering where they shouldn't. When it was basted and tried on, she looked exactly like a bagpipe in it. We were working in the little entresol half-way up-stairs, and though there are three Empire mirrors in that room, you can't see yourself in any one of them, so we had to tell her it didn't do, and never would do. "Take the beastly thing off then!" said Ariadne, almost crying, and pitching the body across the room till it lighted on Amelia's head. (Amelia is the dummy, and the only good figure in the house.) "I won't wear anything at all!" "And I daresay you will look just as nice like that!" I said to tease and console her, but she wouldn't be, and she left the body clinging to Amelia, and began to put on her old blue bodice again, and it was a good thing she did, for the door opened and George and Lady Scilly came in. "Dear me!" Lady Scilly said, in her little drawly voice, that comes of lying in bed late. "You look like Burne-Jones' _Laus Veneris_--'all the maidens, sewing, lily-like a-row.' I persuaded your father to bring me up to have a look at you. He says you are so clever, Ariadne, and make all your own dresses." So George had taken in that fact! I always thought he thought dresses grew, for he has certainly never been plagued with dressmakers' bills. "The eternal feminine, making the garment that expresses her," said George. "Ninepence-halfpenny isn't going to express me!" Ariadne said, under her breath. "It covers me, and that's all!" "I always think," George maundered, "that the symbolic note struck in the toilette is in the nature of a signal, a storm-signal if you will, of the prevailing wind of a woman's mood. Her moods should be variable. She should be a violet wail one day, a peace-offering in blue the next, some mad scarlet incoherent thing another----" "I don't see how you are going to do all that on ninepence-halfpenny," Ariadne said again, for George was too busy listening to himself to listen to her impertinence. "Why you can't even get the colour!" "It is every woman's duty to set an example of beautiful dressing without extravagance!" and he looked at Lady Scilly's pretty pink fluffiness. Paris, of course. I hate Paris, where we never go. "Oh, this," she said very contemptuously, looking down at it as if it was dirt, as all well-dressed women do. "This! This cost nothing at all! I have a clever maid, you know?" "If all the women had clever maids that say they have," Christina whispered to me. "What would become of Camille, I wonder?"