I thought I should not; I thought no human force should avail to put me into it.... I knew it not. It knew not me. I had not proved it. But wear it she did; and when Graham [Mr. George Smith] stood in the doorway looking at her, she tells us her uneasy aspiration was:-- "I _do_ hope he will not think I have been decking myself out to draw attention." Clearly Charlotte Brontë wished posterity to learn how it came about she was garbed in "light fabric and bright tint," because the green dress was a page in her life's history. In a green dress she sat down to dine, as Mr. Thackeray's daughter, Lady Ritchie has written me she well remembers, when Charlotte Brontë dined at Thackeray's house on June 12, 1850--not the event of the distinguished party, when Carlyle, Miss Perry, Mrs. Procter, and others were present, though Lady Ritchie had once confounded the two in writing upon the subject[101]. Mr. Thackeray's daughter was a young girl at the time to which she referred, but she has made clear to me she saw Miss Brontë three times; that the chief occasion was when Charlotte Brontë wore the light green dress. This, to quote her ladyship's words to me, was "not Mrs. Brookfield's party, when neither my sister and I nor our governess dined--though we came down in the evening. The second occasion was just casually at my father's lecture-room, when she did not speak to me, and the third, finally, at the Brookfield evening party, which seems to have been such a solemn affair[102]." These facts fix the wearing of the light green dress by Miss Brontë as June 12, 1850. Lady Ritchie tells me that "It was at an early family dinner by daylight with Charlotte Brontë, my father, Mr. George Smith, my sister and our governess, that I remember sitting next Miss Brontë at dinner and gazing at her _sleeve_ and mittens. Her dress was of some texture like one I had had myself, which I suppose impressed it upon me, and it had a little moss or coral pattern in green on a white ground. I only remember the sleeve, the straight look, and the smooth Victorian bandeaux of hair. I am sure she was _differently_ dressed at the Brookfield evening party." On June 12, 1850, Charlotte Brontë wrote to her friend, Miss Nussey, from the Smiths' in London, saying:-- Thackeray made a call.... If all be well, I am to dine at his house this evening.[103] And this was when Miss Brontë sat in a light green dress at the Thackeray dinner-table.