inside, where forms of pale-blue birds and lavender flowers curled up
and down the cretonne curtains; and a tempered, respectful light fell
upon a cushioned _chaise longue_; for there fluffily reclined, in
garments of tender fabric and gentle colours, the prettiest
twenty-year-old girl in that creditably supplied town.

It must be said that no stranger would have taken Florence at first
glance to be her niece, though everybody admitted that Florence's hair
was pretty. ("I'll say _that_ for her," was the family way of putting
it.). Florence did not care for her hair herself; it was dark and thick
and long, like her Aunt Julia's; but Florence--even in the realistic
presence of a mirror--preferred to think of herself as an ashen blonde,
and also as about a foot taller than she was. Persistence kept this
picture habitually in her mind, which, of course, helps to explain her
feeling that she was justified in wearing that manner of
superciliousness deplored by her mother. More middle-aged gentlemen than
are suspected believe that they look like the waspen youths in the
magazine advertisements of clothes; and this impression of theirs
accounts (as with Florence) for much that is seemingly inexplicable in
their behaviour.

Florence's Aunt Julia was reading an exquisitely made little book, which
bore her initials stamped in gold upon the cover; and it had evidently
reached her by a recent delivery of the mail, for wrappings bearing
cancelled stamps lay upon the floor beside the _chaise longue_. It was a
special sort of book, since its interior was not printed, but all
laboriously written with pen and ink--poems, in truth, containing more
references to a lady named Julia than have appeared in any other poems
since Herrick's. So warmly interested in the reading as to be rather
pink, though not always with entire approval, this Julia nevertheless,