Her white dress, according to the
prevailing fashion, was almost low--as children's frocks used to be in
the days of our great-grandmothers. It was made with a childish full
bodice, and a childish sash of pale blue held up the rounded breast, that
rose and fell with her breathing, beneath the white muslin. Pale blue
stockings, and a pair of white shoes, with preposterous heels and pointed
toes, completed the picture. The mingling, in the dress, of extreme
simplicity with the cunningest artifice, and the greater daring and _joie
de vivre_ which it expressed, as compared with the dress of pre-war days,
made it characteristic and symbolic:--a dress of the New Time.
Geoffrey lay on the grass beside her, feasting his eyes upon
her--discreetly. Since when had English women grown so beautiful? At all
the weddings and most of the dances he had lately attended, the brides
and the _debutantes_ had seemed to him of a loveliness out of all
proportion to that of their fore-runners in those far-off days before the
war. And when a War Office mission, just before the Armistice, had taken
him to some munition factories in the north, he had been scarcely less
seized by the comeliness of the girl-workers:--the long lines of them in
their blue overalls, and the blue caps that could scarcely restrain the
beauty and wealth of pale yellow or red-gold hair beneath.
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