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“Aunt,” she said, “I have been thinking. Three gowns is a great deal of money, and I have the russet and the gray already, which are more than enough for a quiet Season. I do not go to the grand things, after all. The green need not be made up, and if it went back to Madame Levasseur you would have the most of the cost again, and I should be just as —”

“Rosalind, that will do,” said her aunt.

“I should be just as well placed for the evenings I shall actually attend.”

“Rosalind.” Augusta did not raise her voice. She sat down in the chair by the window with the unhurried settling of a woman who means to stay. She looked at her niece directly, and the look did what her voice had not troubled itself to do. “Sit down a moment, if you please. The green will keep, and so will Hannah. I want to say a thing to you, and I had rather say it now than chase you about a fitting with it.”

Rosalind sat on the edge of the sofa, among the russet and the dove gray, and her hands folded themselves together in her lap of their own accord.

“You have done it again,” Augusta said.

“Done what, Aunt?”

“You are working out how little of yourself I can be made to accept. The chocolate, the fire, and now the green. You mean to cost me as little as possible.”

“I only meant to be sensible,” Rosalind began.

“I know. But you have spent years learning that the easiest way to stay welcome is to ask for nothing, and I will not have you do it here.”

Rosalind’s fingers tightened in her lap.

“It was only how things were.”

Augusta leaned forward. “Then hear me clearly. You were not put aside because you were too plain to be loved, Rosalind. You were too useful to be spared.” Her voice gentled. “I wish someone had said that to you years ago.”

Stillness came down over the room. Rosalind sat among the new gowns with her hands gripped together in her lap, while what her aunt had said settled behind her ribs like a stone. She had told herself a thousand versions of the other thing — plain, past it, sensible, made for the back of a house rather than the front of a room — and she had never once turned it the other way about. She could not turn it now. It was too large to turn.

“You are quiet,” Augusta said, more gently.

“I do not know what to do with it,” Rosalind said, and her voice came out very low. “With what you have said, I mean. Where does a person put such a thing?”

“You do not put it anywhere. You let it stand there and be true, which is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, and which grows easier with practice, as most uncomfortable things do.” Augusta sat back, and the dryness came into her voice again, quite deliberately. “And then you go up with Hannah and try on the green, for your mother was always best in green, and I have a notion that you will be too. I should like, just once before I die, to see a Hartley woman stand before a glass in a color she chose and not apologize for the room she takes up.” She waved a hand toward the stairs. “Go on, now. I have said my piece, and I shall not say it twice, since it is very bad for my dignity to be earnest before noon.”

Rosalind rose, though her legs did not feel entirely her own, and she went up with Hannah.

“Only feel the weight of the cloth, my lady,” Hannah said, settling the green over the petticoat and setting to work upon the fastenings. “I have never seen stitching so fine, not in all my days. Madame Levasseur must keep a dozen girls at it, do you not think?”

Rosalind heard scarcely one word in ten of it. Then Hannah turned her by the shoulders toward the long glass on the landing, where the December light came in clean, and stepped back to look at the hang of it.

“There now,” Hannah said, pleased with her work. “Is it not the loveliest thing you have ever seen, my lady? Only look at yourself.”

And Rosalind looked. A woman stood in the glass in a holly-green gown, dark-haired and straight-backed, with her mother’s quickness somewhere about the turn of her head, and for one whole breath Rosalind did not recognize her at all.

The woman in the glass was not plain.

Rosalind stared. She was not a housekeeper or somebody’s cast-off. She was only herself in a green gown that fitted her properly, and the discovery frightened her almost as much as it pleased her.

“You are trembling, my lady,” Hannah said, pausing at the seam. “Are you cold?”

“No,” Rosalind said. “I am not cold.”

Her hand rose in the old reflex, searching for a pin, a fold, some small thing to set right. She stopped it. There was nothing to mend.

She made herself keep looking.

“There,” said Hannah behind her, well pleased. “It hangs lovely, my lady, and it wants nothing at all.”

“No,” Rosalind said quietly. “It wants nothing.”