Here, the party straightway retired to rest; the refreshment of sleep
being necessary after so long a journey; and here they met again
about noon, to a substantial breakfast, spread by direction of Mr John
Browdie, in a small private room upstairs commanding an uninterrupted
view of the stables.
To have seen Miss Squeers now, divested of the brown beaver, the green
veil, and the blue curl-papers, and arrayed in all the virgin splendour
of a white frock and spencer, with a white muslin bonnet, and an
imitative damask rose in full bloom on the inside thereof--her luxuriant
crop of hair arranged in curls so tight that it was impossible they
could come out by any accident, and her bonnet-cap trimmed with little
damask roses, which might be supposed to be so many promising scions of
the big rose--to have seen all this, and to have seen the broad
damask belt, matching both the family rose and the little roses, which
encircled her slender waist, and by a happy ingenuity took off from the
shortness of the spencer behind,--to have beheld all this, and to have
taken further into account the coral bracelets (rather short of beads,
and with a very visible black string) which clasped her wrists, and the
coral necklace which rested on her neck, supporting, outside her frock,
a lonely cornelian heart, typical of her own disengaged affections--to
have contemplated all these mute but expressive appeals to the purest
feelings of our nature, might have thawed the frost of age, and added
new and inextinguishable fuel to the fire of youth.
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