WHILE life and the lust of lovely things remain to Darcy Cole, she will not forget the thrilling experience of that day and other shopping days to follow. When it was all over she possessed: _Item_: A dark-blue serge business suit, cut with a severity of line which on a less graciously girlish figure would have been grim, with a small, trim, expensive hat and the smartest of tan shoes and tan gloves. Clad in that Darcy suggested a demure and business-like bluebird. _Item_: A black-and-white small-checked suit with just a little more latitude of character to it, and, to go with this, black patent-leather shoes from the best shop in town, and a black sailor hat, with a flash of white feather in it. In that Darcy resembled a white-breasted chat, which is perhaps the very most correct and smartest bird that flies. _Item—several items, in fact_: Wonderful but unobvious garments, conjured by the magic touch of Gloria from the purchase of a whole bolt of white, filmy crêpe de chine and several bolts of baby-blue ribbon, together with well-chosen odds and ends of laces; no less wonderful, but much more visible négligées, with long, lustrous rhythmical lines, devised by the same Gloria from the bargain purchase of an odd lot of pink crêpe de chine; arrayed in which Darcy was able to give herself a very fair imitation of a complacent though pale flamingo. _Item_: An evening gown of shimmering silver and blue, carried out, in the curve of the daintiest of silk stockings, to the tip of fairy-gift silver slippers; and over it a blue velvet wrap lined and trimmed with an old chinchilla coat, which Sensible Auntie had given her several years before; wherein Darcy felt like some winged and shining thing come down from a moonlit cloud. That was the end of eight hundred of Aunt Sarah’s, hard, round, beautiful dollars. But not of the wonderful trip to Clothes-Land. For, at the last, Gloria produced the most stunning of traveling coats, dark-blue cheviot, with a quaint little cape, the whole lined with silken gray—a gray with a touch of under-color to match the blue warmth behind the gray of Darcy’s eyes. “For your wedding present, my dear,” explained Gloria mischievously. And when the girl wept for sheer delight, her mentor abused her and called her “Amanda,” and threatened her with dreadful reprisals unless she at once dried her eyes so that account could be duly taken of her. Of that stock-taking Gloria, re-creatrix, made no report to the subject. But this is what her gratified eyes saw.