"Is this meant for an attack on my tie? You'll be wearing one like it yourself in a fortnight! Mrs. Ogilvie's great fun. Yesterday she took me with her and a sort of country girl, a clergyman's daughter from Earl's Court, to buy a hat at Lewis's; (for the girl I mean). It was _extraordinary_! The girl isn't at all bad-looking, but naturally wears her hair _perfectly_ flat, with a kind of knob at the back, the wrong kind. On the top of this the milliners stuck, first, the most enormous hat, eccentric beyond the dreams of the Rue de la Paix, all feathers, and said, Oh, quel joli mouvement, Madame! The poor girl, frightened to death, thinking the birds were alive, tore it off. So then they tried on those absurd, tiny, high, little things that require at least twenty-five imitation curls to keep them up, and show them off, and in which poor Miss Winter looked like an escaped lunatic. We tried everything in the shop, and at last Mrs. Ogilvie said, 'Perhaps we had better come again, later in the season, when the hats would be smaller, or not so large.'--Do you know Miss Winter? She has _rather_ pretty red hair, and a dazed intellectual expression. She's the sort of girl who can only wear a sailor hat (I never saw a sailor in a straw), as they call them, or perhaps something considered picturesque in the suburbs; you know, with skyblue _crêpe de chine_ strings under the chin. If she'd only been an athletic girl we could have gone straight to Scott's, and then we should have known where we were--but she's artistic, poor thing." Bertie smiled mischievously. "Your valuable advice doesn't seem to have been much use, then?" "_Rather_ not! Especially as Mrs. Ogilvie has this craze about thinking she's Oriental (I wonder who put it into her head), and _would_ order absurd beaded things, like Roman helmets, when of course she'd look delightful in a dark claret-coloured velvet sort of Gainsborough, with dull brown feathers. But women are so perverse. Look how they won't wear black when nothing suits them so well!" "Won't they? I wonder you don't go into the millinery business. I think you'd do very well." "Don't talk rot. I'm only interested as an amateur; it's art for art's sake. But I _do_ understand frocks. I will say that I think women's dress is the only thing worth being really extravagant on. Don't you?" "No, I don't." They were now proceeding down Bond Street at a pace that the crowd compelled to be rather leisurely. "There's Aunt William in her old-fashioned barouche with the grey horses. It's _such_ a comfort to me, always, to see Mrs. Crofton; it makes one feel at least there is something stationary in this changeable world. Who's that boy looking at?--at you? Isn't it the Crofton boy?" "Yes. Let's stop a minute; I want to speak to him." Savile, seeing them, crossed the road, and said, before Bertie could begin-- "Extraordinary weather for the time of--year!"