She had stood still, and she had looked agreeable, and the lace had appeared on her clothes, and she had gone to the ball or the dinner or the morning service in whichever lace she had been provided with, and that had been the end of her involvement with lace as a category.
This morning, she was being asked to have opinions on lace.
She was being asked to have opinions on lace because Joanna, who had appointed herself the sole administrator of her weddinggown, had taken her to a shop on Bond Street whose owner had laid out on a long mahogany counter under a great bay window eleven samples of lace in eleven slightly different shades of cream, all of them indistinguishable from one another to Alice’s eye, and had then asked Alice which one she preferred.
“Joanna.”
“You must choose.”
“I do not see any difference, Joanna.”
“There is a great deal of difference. There is, for instance, the difference between Brussels and Honiton. There is a difference between the very fine and the moderately fine. There is a difference between the pattern with the small lily and the pattern with the small leaf. There is?—”
“They are all cream, Joanna.”
“They are not all cream.”
“They are all cream.”
“Lady Alice.” The owner, who had been hovering at a careful distance, came forward. She was a small, neat woman of about fifty with very clean hands and a careful manner. She had been dressing the daughters of the ton for thirty years and had not yet been startled by any of them. “If I may. The Brussels is for the dress itself. The Honiton is for the veil. You might want to havedifferent patterns at the wrists and the throat. May I show you what I have in mind?”
Alice nodded.
The owner moved her small, clean hands across the counter. She drew out three of the samples, set the others aside, laid the three in a particular order on a square of dark velvet, and pointed.
“This for the gown. This for the veil. This for the wrists. Together.”
Alice looked.
They were, in fact, different. Against the dark velvet, they looked very different. She had not seen the difference until the woman had separated them.
The woman, with the calm competence of half a lifetime of doing this, had done a thing for her she had not been able to do for herself, and Alice briefly felt an irrational lift of her heart at being shown a thing about her own wedding gown that she had not known to look for.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, those. Thank you.”
“Very good, My Lady.” The owner moved away.
Joanna, standing beside her, was watching her face. “Alice.”
“Joanna.”
“You like the lace now.”
“I like the lace now.”
“Two minutes ago, you did not see the lace at all.”
“Two minutes ago, I had not been shown the lace.”
Joanna laughed.
Joanna, who had been laughing a great deal more this morning than was warranted by the matter of lace, took her arm and pulled her closer along the counter in the small confidential way she had when she meant to say a thing she did not want the owner to hear.
“Alice.”
“Joanna.”
“You are not eating.”
