are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it are
washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these
beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have bidden
yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from the
carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where they
are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others glide
on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar, perhaps
that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally. They
arrive in twos and threes, young girls commonly with their mothers, but
sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and with the
rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging
draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even
when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is
obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity,
sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring
alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without
being unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do not carry
themselves well, it takes an American woman to see it. They move
naturally and lightly--that is, the young girls do; mothers in England,
as elsewhere, are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are as
handsome in their well-wearing English way as their daughters.

Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron barriers, and in one
of these the arriving groups of authorized people found other people of
their kind, where the unauthorized people seemed by common consent to
leave them. There was especially one enclosure which seemed consecrated
to the highest comers; it was not necessary that they should make the
others feel they were not wanted there; the others felt it of
themselves, and did not attempt to enter that especial fairy ring, or
fairy triangle. Those within looked as much at home as if in their own