Chapter 29: Margaret Pays a Call

The next morning, between eleven o’clock and noon, Margaret went out visiting. She had paid much attention to her costume, more than she was wont to do. Her mind travelled back to the day on which she had been repulsed from Cuthbert Grahame’s door; she endeavoured to recall what on that occasion she had worn. Women have a mnemonic system of their own; with them clothes and events are inseparably associated. They recall one by a reference to the other. Miss Wallace had no difficulty in recollecting precisely what garments she had worn; she had even a fair perception of how she had looked in them. She made it her immediate purpose to look again as much as possible as she had looked then. Almost providentially, as it seemed, the dress itself was still in existence, hidden away at the bottom of a box. She had never worn it since. First, because, although cheap enough, it was fashioned of very delicate material, and the hot water which had been poured upon her had blotched it here and there with stains which she had found it impossible to attempt to conceal. Then it was connected with an episode which, whenever she saw it, would instantly recur. The recurrence afforded her no pleasure. As, after excavating it, she surveyed its many creases, she meditated.

“It almost looks as if, from the first, I had preserved it with a particular end in view, with the intention of producing it, when the mathematical moment arrived, as what the French call a pièce de conviction. It’s ages behind the fashion, but that will only serve to impress its significance more forcibly on her.”

She contrived something in the way of head-gear which was reminiscent of the hat she had worn that day. Her nimble fingers reproduced the various trifles which in a woman’s attire are of such capital importance; she even dressed her hair in a fashion which was obsolete. When, fully costumed, she surveyed herself in a looking-glass, it seemed to her that the results were most surprising.

“Wonderful how the modes do change! It is not so many years ago, and I am sure that then I was up-to-date; but now I look as if I had come out of the ark; I might be in fancy-dress. I shall have to take a cab; I should never dare to walk through the streets like this; they’d take me for a guy. When Mrs. Gregory Lamb sees me, if she’s still in anything like the state of mind which that charming husband of hers described last night, it won’t be wonderful if she takes me for a ghost.”

She put in a portfolio certain drawings which she had risen at a very matutinal hour to make; the portfolio she placed beneath her arm, and, thus equipped, she sallied forth upon her errand. The street in which she had her lodging being of modest pretensions, was but little frequented by cabs. She had a five minutes’ walk before she found one. And during that short promenade she was the object of so much attention, especially from the females as she passed, that she was glad when, seated in a hansom, she was at least partially concealed by the friendly apron.

She found the door of Mrs. Lamb’s residence in Connaught Square wide open. On the steps stood a shabbily dressed man, with his hands in his trouser pockets, an ancient bowler pressed tightly down upon his head, and a clay pipe between his lips. When Margaret addressed him he moved neither his hat, nor himself, nor his pipe.