The pink dressing-gown that Pinnie had engaged to make for Rose Muniment became in Lomax Place a conspicuous object, supplying poor Amanda with a constant theme for reference to one of the great occasions of her life—her visit to Belgrave Square with Lady Aurora after their meeting at Rosy’s bedside. She detailed this episode minutely to her companion, repeating a thousand times that her ladyship’s affability was beyond anything she could have expected. The grandeur of the house in Belgrave Square figured in her recital as something oppressive and fabulous, tempered though it had been by shrouds of brown holland and the nudity of staircases and saloons of which the trappings had been put away. “If it’s so noble when they’re out of town what can it be when they’re all there together and everything’s out?” she inquired suggestively; and she permitted herself to be restrictive only on two points, one of which was the state of Lady Aurora’s gloves and bonnet-strings. If she hadn’t been afraid to appear to notice the disrepair of these objects she should have been so happy to offer to do any little mending. “If she’d only come to me every week or two I’d keep up her rank for her,” said Pinnie, who had visions of a needle that positively flashed in the disinterested service of the aristocracy. She added that her ladyship got all dragged out with her long expeditions to Camberwell; she might be in tatters for all they could do to help her, at the top of those dreadful stairs, with that strange sick creature (she was too unnatural) thinking only of her own finery and talking about her complexion. If she wanted pink she should have pink; but to Pinnie there was something almost unholy in it, like decking out a corpse or dressing up the cat. This was the second perversity that left Miss Pynsent cold; it couldn’t be other than difficult for her to enter into the importance her ladyship appeared to attach to those pushing people. The girl was unfortunate certainly, stuck up there like a puppy on a shelf, but in her ladyship’s place she would have found some topic more in keeping while they walked about under those tremendous gilded ceilings. Lady Aurora, seeing how she was struck, showed her all over the house, carrying the lamp herself and telling an old woman who was there—a “confidential” housekeeper, a person with ribbons in her cap who would have pushed Pinnie out if you could push with your eyes—that they would do very well without her. If the pink dressing-gown, in its successive stages of development, filled up the little brown parlour (it was terribly long on the stocks), making such a pervasive rose-coloured presence as had not been seen there for many a day, this was evidently because it was associated with Lady Aurora, not because it was dedicated to her humble friend.