side, the simple or the complex, you are touching. May not there
be the deepest of all allegories in Eve standing midway between
the innocent apple and the guileful serpent? I shall have to see
more of Carlotta before I can safely explain her to Judith.

At any rate she is no longer attired like an odalisque of the
Second Empire, and Mrs. McMurray has saved her from the
lamentable errors of taste shown by the female mountebank of
sixteenth century France. My excellent friend safely delivered
up an exhausted and bewildered charge at half-past seven last
evening, assuring me that her task had been easy, and that her
anticipations of it being the day of her life had been fulfilled.
It had been like dressing a doll, she explained, beaming.

An edifying pastime for an adult woman! I did not utter this
sentiment, for she would rightly have styled me the most
ungrateful of unhung wretches.

Carlotta, then, had followed her about like a perambulatory doll,
upon which she had fitted all the finery she could lay her hands
on. Apparently the atmosphere of the great shops had acted on
Carlotta like an anaesthetic. She had moved in a sensuous dream
of drapery, wherein the choice-impulse was paralysed. The only
articles upon which, in an unclouded moment, she had set her
heart--and that with a sudden passion of covetousness--were a
pair of red, high-heeled shoes and a cheap red parasol.

"You have no idea what it means," said Mrs. McMurray, "to buy
_everything_ that a woman needs."