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By Root 1534 0

“and I should love to see Venice.” “You may, perhaps, before very long,” Elstir informed her, “be able to gaze at the marvellous stuffs which they used to wear. One used only to be able to see them in the works of the Venetian painters, or very rarely among the treasures of old churches, or now and then when a specimen turned up in the sale-room. But I hear that a Venetian artist, called Fortuny, has rediscovered the secret of the craft, and that in a few years’ time women will be able to parade around, and better still to sit at home, in brocades as sumptuous as those that Venice adorned for her patrician daughters with patterns brought from the Orient. But I don’t know whether I should much care for that, whether it wouldn’t be too much of an anachronism for the women of today, even when they parade at regattas, for, to return to our modern pleasure-craft, the times have completely changed since ‘Venice, Queen of the Adriatic.’ The great charm of a yacht, of the furnishings of a yacht, of yachting clothes, is their simplicity, as things of the sea, and I do so love the sea. I must confess that I prefer the fashions of today to those of Veronese’s and even of Carpaccio’s time. What is so attractive about our yachts—and the medium-sized yachts especially, I don’t like the huge ones, they’re too much like ships; and the same goes for hats, there must be some sense of proportion—is the uniform surface, simple, gleaming, grey, which in a bluish haze takes on a creamy softness. The cabin ought to make us think of a little café. And it’s the same with women’s clothes on board a yacht; what’s really charming are those light garments, uniformly white, cotton or linen or nankeen or drill, which in the sunlight and against the blue of the sea show up with as dazzling a whiteness as a spread sail. Actually, there are very few women who know how to dress, though some of them are quite wonderful. At the races, Mlle Léa had a little white hat and a little white sunshade that were simply enchanting. I don’t know what I wouldn’t give for that little sunshade.”

I should have liked very much to know in what respect this little sunshade differed from any other, and for other reasons, reasons of feminine coquetry, Albertine was still more curious. But, just as Françoise used to explain the excellence of her soufflés by saying simply: “It’s a knack,” so here the difference lay in the cut. “It was tiny and round, like a Chinese parasol,” Elstir said. I mentioned the sunshades carried by various women, but none of them would do. Elstir found them all quite hideous. A man of exquisite taste, singularly hard to please, he would isolate some minute detail which was the whole difference between what was worn by three-quarters of the women he saw, and which he abominated, and a thing which enchanted him by its prettiness; and—in contrast to its effect on myself, for whom every kind of luxury was stultifying—stimulated his desire to paint “so as to make something as attractive.”

“Here you see a young lady who has guessed what the hat and sunshade were like,” he said to me, pointing to Albertine, whose eyes shone with covetousness.

“How I should love to be rich and to have a yacht!” she said to the painter. “I should come to you for advice on how to do it up. What lovely trips I’d make! And what fun it would be to go to Cowes for the regatta! And a motor-car! Tell me, do you think women’s fashions for motoring pretty?”

“No,” replied Elstir, “but that will come in time. You see, there are very few good couturiers at present, one or two only, Callot—although they go in rather too freely for lace—Doucet, Cheruit, Paquin sometimes. The others are all ghastly.”

“So there’s a vast difference between a Callot dress and one from any ordinary shop?” I asked Albertine.

“Why, an enormous difference, my little man! Oh, sorry! Only, alas! what you get for three hundred francs in an ordinary shop will cost two thousand there. But there can be no comparison; they look the same only to people who know nothing at all about it.”

“Quite so,” put in Elstir, “though