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Updated: May 17, 2025
Lady Warner rose from her high-backed chair by the chimney corner in the oak parlour, and laid aside the book she had been reading, to welcome her son, startled at seeing him followed by a tall, fair girl in a black mantle and hood, and a little slip of a thing, with bright dark eyes and small determined face, pert, pointed, interrogative, framed in swansdown a small aerial figure in a white cloth cloak, and a scarlet brocade frock, under which two little red shoes danced into the room.
May came in, and said, 'I want you to sketch off a portrait of her dicky-bird for Meta; and he put before her a natural history with a figure of that tiny humming-bird which is endowed with swansdown knickerbockers. 'By the bye, where is the sprite?
He wore the silver-grey dressing-gown trimmed with white swansdown in which Cairn had seen him before. His statuesque ivory face was set in a smile, which yet was no smile of welcome; the over-red lips smiled alone; the long, glittering dark eyes were joyless; almost, beneath the straightly-pencilled brows, sinister. Save for the short, lustreless hair it was the face of a handsome, evil woman.
Lord Swansdown and the other Englishmen aboard seldom joined their king since he had preferred the company of an untitled American to theirs. The first named could not often have made a member of the party if he had wished, for he kept his room most of the time, declaring that he had never been so beastly seasick in his life.
On close inspection, no less so appeared the child's equipment; the lilac silk pelisse, the small swansdown boa, the white bonnet the whole holiday toilette, in short, was the gala garb of a cherub but too well known, of that tadpole, Desiree Beck and Desiree Beck it was she, or an imp in her likeness.
"Perhaps you covet a wreath of embroidery round it, gold leaves and scarlet flowers, with a swansdown collar? It would only be in keeping with that shirt and waistcoat. I might as well have gone and ordered a white tarletan dress, looped up with peas, and streamed through the town in that guise. It would be just as consistent."
There was Peggy, blushing and smiling, looking as pleased as a little child, arrayed in the rose-coloured tea-gown whose existence she had endangered on the night of her arrival; and there beside her, holding her hand, was Rita, in pale blue and swansdown, Rita, also smiling, but with the mockery for once gone from eyes and mouth, and with traces of tears on her beautiful face.
He loved not the chase, nor any other amusement requiring exertion. He doted upon swansdown sofas with springs, French plays, cigars and chocolate. He came to the country to find repose, good air and an appetite.
I feel such a fraud when I think of being put upon a pedestal by you, when some little hole where I am out of sight is my true place. I am like the man in Browning who mourned over the spots upon his 'speckled hide, but rejoiced in the swansdown of his lady. And so, my own dear sweet little swansdown lady, good-night to you, with my heart's love now and for ever from your true lover, Saturday!
To wear over this a long cloak of white satin with a wide collar of swansdown, was the dernier cri of Paris, Madame assured her customer. There were other dresses and hats too, for morning and afternoon, and even more extravagant dessous than those Jennings had tabooed in London. After the first, Mary forgot to ask prices.
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