three gowns of superb material and spread them across the table under the gray winter light. One was of black, one of green—the color of deep jade—and the third was the color of flame, so brilliant that in the comfortable shabby room it destroyed all else.
"I'm sorry I let you stay at Shane's Castle," began her mother. "Lily . . . Lily . . ." she halted abruptly and regarded her daughter with suspicion. "She didn't promise you anything, did she?"
Ellen laughed, but through the sound of her soft mirth there ran, like a taut singing wire, the echo of subdued bitterness. "No. At least nothing very definite. . . . She said that when I came to Paris to study I could live with her. We didn't get beyond that."
"But you don't want to go to Paris. . . . It's a wicked city. . . . I thought you'd given all that up long ago."
But Ellen only lifted the flame colored gown and said, "Look at it. Feel it. Isn't it beautiful?" And she ran her hand over the soft brocade with a sensuous air that was new and alarming. "There's nothing like it in all the Town."
Dumbly the mother fingered the stuff; she felt of it tenderly, reverently, and after a long time she said, "But you couldn't wear such clothes here. Nobody has ever seen anything like them . . . except on Lily, and she's different. That's why people talk about her. No, you couldn't wear them here. People would laugh at you."
For an answer Ellen only held up the green gown and then the black one. They were simply made and not dissimilar, the flame colored one girdled by a chain of glittering rhinestones, the others by cords of silver. They were so scant there seemed to be nothing to them, so simply made that their lack of ornament conveyed to Hattie Tolliver a sense of nakedness. People in the Town wore bows, rosebuds, festoons of lace—all save Lily.
"I don't see what Lily was thinking of," she observed presently. And she drew in her lower lip doubtfully with an air of meditation as if the gowns raised before her eyes a wild vista of foreign orgies.
